Bryn Mawr Classical Review  Bryn Mawr Classical Review
2000.05.21  Rhiannon Ash, Ordering Anarchy: Armies and Leaders
in Tacitus' Histories.   London:  Duckworth, 1999.  Pp. x, 246.
 ISBN 0-7156-2800-3.  £40.00.    Reviewed by Jason Davies,
University College London ( Word count: 3105 words  It is
difficult to tell whether Ash has invented a new topic or
returned to an old chestnut with more insight than her
predecessors: Ordering Anarchy is at once 'Tacitus'
characterisation revisited' and the first dedicated study of the
interplay of personalities in the Histories that goes beyond
labelling the author a cynic and a pessimist (i.e. throwing
one's hands up in despair). What was (at least to this reviewer
and apparently many others) a shifting and often confusing
series of apparently inconsistent statements about the different
armies, generals and emperors in the civil war of 68-9 becomes a
subtle texture of shifting concerns, loyalties, moods and
responses to circumstance. Put most simply, this book reveals h