Reviews Christopher S. van den Berg, The World of Tacitus' Dialogus de Orato­ ribus: Aesthetics and Empire in Ancient Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107020900 If, as Ronald Syme remarked, "Tacitus gives little away," this is espe­ cially true for the Dialogus de Oratoribus.1 Elusive as Tacitus is in his historical works, he is more so in the Dialogus: Tacitus himself plays no real role in the dialogue (unlike Cicero, who sometimes appeared in his own dialogues), and readers have long puzzled over which speaker, if any, wins the day or repre­ sents Tacitus. The enigmatic character of the Dialogus has led to a variety of readings, most of which seek to pinpoint either a single argument or a single speaker as embodying the text's positive message. Each of these readings faces inter- and intratextual difficulties, as Christopher S. Van den Berg amply demonstrates in this volume. Rather than seek to resolve these tensions by identifying a particular speaker with Tacitus or describing an argument or speech as more persuasive, van den Berg argues that the "manifold contradic­ tions" (p. 124) within and across the speeches are, in fact, intentional and pro­ ductive features of the dialogue. In grappling with these tensions, along with the intertextual and intratextual dimensions of the work, van den Berg deve­ lops an interpretive approach that he terms "argumentative dynamics," an approach rooted in the very dialogue(s) that van den Berg studies. The result is an original and deeply learned approach to a perplexing and important text. The book consists of seven substantive chapters, along with an introduc­ tion, conclusion, and appendix featuring a detailed, outline of the Dialogus. Chapter 1 focuses on the first set of speeches (Aper and Messalla), weaving this analysis together with an overview of Tacitus' biography, the external and internal dating of the Dialogus, the role of rhetoric and declamation in imperial Rome, the work's Ciceronian engagements, and the dialogue genre. The "argumentative dynamic" interpretive approach is outlined in Chapter 2, where it is contrasted with "persuasion oriented" and "character oriented" (p. 56) approaches. The "persuasion oriented" seeks to describe a speech or set of speeches as being more persuasive than others, while the "character ori­ ented" seeks to identify a speaker with Tacitus. Both, though, seek to develop a coherent interpretation of the Dialogus according to which a particular 1 Ronald Syme, Tacitus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), Vol. II, p. 520. Khetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 3, pp. 320-329. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: / /w\nv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.3.320. Reviews 321 argument or speaker effectively wins. Both approaches face abundant difficul­ ties: the dialogue is far from the Platonic model, featuring neither Socratic elendms nor deliberative exchange (p. 124), while Tacitus himself undermines his own voice and, in Academic fashion, allows each speaker to subtly under­ mine the persuasiveness of the others without engaging in direct question and answer. Argumentative dynamics seeks, instead, to explore "how dialogue functions to create and communicate meaning" turning to the text itself to recover "these functional strategies" (p. 94). Reading the Dialogus in light of the dialogue form - and as a literary work rather than a philosophical work, per se - focuses our attention on a number of features, the result of which is a rhetorical-literary reading in which the dialogue's "rhetorical aspects" are in fact the "core message" (p. 95) of the work. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 turn to an interpretation of the Dialogus itself. Interstitial passages are the focus of Chapter 3, in which van den Berg explores the way in which interstices contain "categories which describe the evolution of eloqueutia" (p. 99). Chapter 4 centers on what van den Berg describes as a sort of "rapprochement" (p. 164) between poetry (championed, ostensibly, by Maternus) and oratory (championed by Aper). That is, rather than view Maternus...