La stilistica del sintagma nell'arte di Tacito

Tacitus’style is based on highlighting the phrase structure, developing some hints already attested in Cicero and Sallust, and placing itself in an evolutionary trend of Latin prose that goes from the centrality of the sentence in Seneca to that of the word in Fronto. The multi-faceted typology of the phrase stylistics in Tacitus includes the focus on the phrases in incipit, the variation of the canonical syntactic structure of the phrase, the use of noun phrases in sequences of predicates without copula in the so-called nominal style, and the alternation between noun phrases and verbal sentences. In the late Renaissance age, the stylistic fashion of Tacitism promoted the development of the grammatical concept of phrase and the decline of the model of Ciceronian prose, triggering in modernity a stylistic evolution similar to that which had occurred in antiquity.