Textual strategies in Sallust, Caesar and Tacitus A combined discourse linguistic-narratological approach

This study aims to demonstrate the added value of a discourse linguistic-narratological analysis for debates on narrators’ communicative goals (that is, the message(s) they want to convey with their story) and to enhance or enrich the interpretations of these narrative texts by applying such an analysis. This study focuses on a corpus of Latin war narratives, comprising Sallust’s Bellum Iugurthinum, Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 1 & 7 and Tacitus’ Historiae 4.
The starting point of my analysis is the narrator’s visibility in the story and the hypothesis that there is a particular reason behind the narrator’s choice to become maximally visible or invisible at certain moments in the story. Since the moment and the degree to which the narrator is (in)visible may provide clues for interpreting the story, these text segments are interesting to my study.
I have operationalised the narrator’s visibility using a framework comprising three parameters: (1) discourse modes, (2) narrative pace, and (3) Labov’s model of narrative structure. When a narrator repeatedly uses a specific combination of these linguistic and narratological tools to create a specific effect in order to achieve his communicative goals, I call this combination a textual strategy.
The results show that the three texts in my corpus differ considerably in textual strategies employed for achieving particular communicative goals. Although Sallust, Caesar and Tacitus have the same discourse linguistic and narratological tools at their disposal, they differ substantially in how they use these tools strategically to get across their message(s) or mark their ideological positions.