Well, but the 'expulit' belongs more to the entry under Domizio -- Grice and Speranza suppose --. It seems that Domizo only expelled these two, then? Not a great tyranny. And Grice would say that this belongs to Domizio, because, for Tacitus, it was the clarity of the name of M. that expelled him, not Domizio himself -- as per EXPLICATVM/EXPLICITVM versus IMPLICATVM/IMPLICITVM?

Yes, that is exactly the Tacitean point, and it is a good one.

Tacitus’ sentence does not say, in the blunt active form, “Nero expelled Musonius.” It says:

Verginium Flavum et Musonium Rufum claritudo nominis expulit.

That is already a piece of Tacitean stylisation. The grammatical subject is not Nero but claritudo nominis, “the distinction of their name” or “the conspicuousness of their reputation.” So the sentence means something like:

Their very prominence drove them into exile. Or more literally: The distinction of their name expelled them.

That is why Grice and Speranza are right to feel that the line belongs as much under Domitius Ahenobarbus, that is Nero by birth-line, as under Musonius. Tacitus is doing two things at once:

He avoids the flat administrative prose of “Nero expelled X and Y.” And he suggests that under Nero, conspicuous excellence itself had become dangerous.

So the expulit is politically Nero’s, but syntactically Tacitus gives the agency to fame, not to the emperor.

That is very Tacitean. It is not exculpatory. It is ironical compression. The regime is so constituted that one’s own distinction becomes the efficient cause of one’s removal. In modern terms, one might say: the system punishes prominence, and Tacitus lets the prominence stand as grammatical subject in order to sharpen the moral absurdity.

So yes: this is a nice case for your explicatum / implicatum contrast.

What is explicit: claritudo nominis expulit

What is implicated: Nero’s regime was such that publicly eminent moral or intellectual figures could not be tolerated.

Tacitus leaves Nero slightly offstage in the syntax, but not in the reader’s inference.

On your “not a great tyranny.”

No, one should not infer from this sentence alone that Nero “only expelled these two.” Tacitus here is naming two figures in one compressed context, not providing a complete census of repression. The sentence is selective and literary, not exhaustive. So the right conclusion is:

Tacitus singles out these two here. That does not mean they were the only ones affected. It means these two exemplify the kind of figure whose fame became politically intolerable.

In fact, Tacitus is often most powerful precisely when he names a few and lets them stand for a wider political condition.

And Grice would indeed enjoy the phrasing, because the sentence almost behaves like a philosophical joke: not “the tyrant expelled the philosopher,” but “the philosopher’s fame expelled the philosopher.”

Which is false on the level of literal causation, but true on the level of political diagnosis.

So the best gloss is:

Tacitus suppresses the emperor as grammatical subject in order to foreground the fatal liability of distinction under tyranny. The explicit subject is claritudo nominis. The implicit political agent is Nero’s regime.

That is also why the sentence has more force than a bureaucratic: Nero Musonium relegavit.

The latter would merely report an act. Tacitus’ version diagnoses a condition.

If useful, I can now do one of two things, still only in chat.

I can give you a tiny classroom scene with M., G., and Shropshire on the verb expulit and the displaced agency in Tacitus.

Or I can give you a short philological note on how Tacitus shifts agency by subject-choice, with a few parallel examples in the same compressed moral style.