Book-endings and Narrative Transitions in Tacitus's Historiae

In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of the formal setup of closure and book-ending in ancient literature, with particular attention paid to the communicative strategies adopted by poets in ending their works or the single books of their works. This approach can also be applied to prose, and is especially fruitful in the case of Tacitus because of the artistic qualities of the historian, who has been described as a "poet of history" by various authorities. This paper aims to trace the formal methods and tools used by Tacitus to shape the narrative transitions from one book to another in his Historiae in order to identify possible connections between the narrative and the historiographical and ideological construction of events.