Virtus et Fortuna : le général et l’armée au combat chez Tacite

As many other ancient historians, Tacitus is familiar with the concepts of uirtus and fortuna, which have been broadly used as a key for reading history during the Hellenistic period and as a mean of representing battles in Rome. Yet, although occasionally employed in their traditional sense ¢ namely that the soldier’s intrinsic merit, i. e. his bravery, must go hand in hand with the extrinsic manifestation of luck ¢, those notions are most of the time given a completely different meaning in his works. Indeed, the system they formmerges with another mostly tacitean dichotomy between individual and collective. In this new ideological configuration, the unpredictable events - fortuna - are caused by the irrational behaviour of the crowd, while, facing the mob, only the commander can and must show his uirtus, being then defined as a sort of practical intelligence.Autin Louis. Virtus et Fortuna : le général et l’armée au combat chez Tacite. In: Vita Latina, N°195-196, 2017. pp. 207-231