>..From the end of the first century of the Imperial Age something sultry and
>oppressive appears, a darkening of the atmosphere of life. It is umistakable
>in Seneca, and the somber tone of Tactitus' historical writing has often been
>noted. But here in Ammianus we find that the process has reached the stage
>of a magical and sensory dehumanization. That the sensory vividness of the
>events should profit from this paralysis of the human is indeed notable...
>the characteristics of Ammianus' style...are to be found all through his
>work. Everywhere human emotion and rationality yield to the magically and
>somberly sensory, to the graphic and gestural... And the background of it
>all is this: the persons treated live between a frenzy of bloodshed and
>mortal terror. Grotesque and sadistic, spectral and superstitious, lusting
>for power yet constantly trying to conceal the chattering of their teeth--so
>do we see the men of Ammianus' ruling class and their world. His strange
>sense of humor might also be mentioned... In this humor there is always an
>element of bitterness, of the grotesque, very often of something grotesquely
>gruesome and inhumanly convulsive. Ammianus' world is somber: it is full of
>superstition, blood frenzy, exhaustion, fear of death, and grim and magically
>rigid gestures; and to counterbalance all this there is nothing but the
>equally somber and pathetic determination to accomplish an ever more
>difficult, ever more desperate task: to protect the Empire, threatened from
>without and crumbling from within. This determination gives the strongest
>among the actors on Ammianus' stage a rigid, convulsive superhumanity with no
>possibility of relaxation...
Sounds like X-files or any moment in Lynch, doesn't it?
Thanks for the quote, I read Mimesis, but didn't remember this.
Joanna