Study guide
The Annals
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Overview
- Author
- Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus, c. AD 56–after 117, senator, consul in 97 and proconsul of Asia c. 112–113
- Latin title
- Ab excessu divi Augusti, 'From the death of the deified Augustus'; the title Annales is traditional
- Written
- Probably in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, about AD 110–120, after the Histories
- Period covered
- AD 14–68 in the original plan, from the death of Augustus to (probably) the death of Nero; surviving text covers AD 14–37 and 47–66 with gaps
- Genre
- Roman historiography in the annalistic form, arranged year by year under the consuls
- Language
- Latin prose, famous for its brevity, irregularity, archaism and sudden epigrams
- What survives
- Books 1–4, a fragment of 5, Book 6, and Books 11 (missing its opening) to 16 (breaking off in AD 66); Books 7–10 and the end are lost
- Transmission
- Books 1–6 in a single ninth-century manuscript (the First Medicean); Books 11–16 in an eleventh-century manuscript from Monte Cassino (the Second Medicean), both now in Florence
- Main figures
- Tiberius, Germanicus, Sejanus, Claudius, Messalina, the younger Agrippina, Nero, Seneca
- Translation quoted
- Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (1876), with their chapter numbering
Context
Tacitus was born around AD 56, probably in northern Italy or southern Gaul, into a family of equestrian rank. He rose through the senatorial career under the Flavian emperors, held the consulship in 97 and governed the province of Asia around 112–113. He married the daughter of the general Agricola, whose biography he wrote. His career thus spanned the reign of Domitian, whose last years of terror he lived through as a senator, and the more tolerant regimes of Nerva and Trajan (Syme 1958) (Mellor 1993).
His first works, the Agricola and the Germania (both AD 98), were followed by the Dialogue on Orators and the Histories, which narrated the years from 69, the 'year of the four emperors', to the death of Domitian in 96. The Annals were written last and went back further in time, from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the fall of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with Nero in 68. Together the two works probably comprised thirty books.
The annalistic form, organising events year by year under the names of the consuls, was the traditional form of Roman history and recalls the republican past when the consuls really governed. Tacitus uses it with deliberate irony: the old framework of Senate and magistrates continues, but the real story takes place in the palace, among the emperor's family, freedmen and guard. He often bends the form, carrying stories across years or delaying events for dramatic effect (Ginsburg 1981).
Tacitus' sources included earlier historians now lost (among them Aufidius Bassus, Pliny the Elder, Cluvius Rufus and Fabius Rusticus), memoirs such as those of the younger Agrippina, and the records of the Senate. Inscriptions such as the Senate's decree on Piso and the Lyon Tablet with Claudius' speech allow us to see him at work on documents. His style, compressed and asymmetrical, with ironic juxtapositions and pointed sentences (sententiae), owes much to Sallust and has made him a model for political writers ever since (Martin 1981) (Woodman 1988).
The Annals have exercised a huge influence on European political thought. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, they were read as a manual of the secrets of power; 'Tacitism' became a movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and readers from Justus Lipsius and Ben Jonson, author of the tragedy Sejanus, to Montesquieu and Gibbon found in Tacitus both a critique of tyranny and a guide to survival under it. The text quoted in this guide is the translation of Church and Brodribb (1876), long the standard English version (Luce 1993) (Pagán 2012).
Plot overview
The Annals begin with the death of Augustus in AD 14 and the accession of his stepson Tiberius, who pretends reluctance while securing the army. Germanicus, Tiberius' popular nephew and heir, suppresses mutinies on the Rhine and campaigns in Germany before being sent to the East, where he dies in AD 19, accusing the governor Piso of poisoning him. His widow Agrippina returns with his ashes and becomes the focus of opposition.
From AD 23 the praetorian prefect Sejanus dominates Tiberius, poisons the emperor's son Drusus, and destroys Agrippina and her sons. Tiberius withdraws to Capri; treason trials multiply. Sejanus falls in AD 31 (the account is lost), but the trials continue until Tiberius dies in AD 37. The books on Gaius (Caligula) and the first years of Claudius are lost.
The narrative resumes in AD 47 with Claudius dominated by his wife Messalina and his freedmen. Messalina's bigamous marriage to Silius brings her death; Claudius marries his niece Agrippina, adopts her son Nero and is poisoned by her in AD 54. Nero, guided at first by Seneca and Burrus, murders his stepbrother Britannicus, his mother Agrippina and his wife Octavia.
Under Nero's later rule, the great fire of AD 64 destroys much of Rome; Nero blames the Christians and builds his Golden House. The failed conspiracy of Piso in AD 65 brings the deaths of Seneca, Lucan and many others, and the purges continue with Petronius and the Stoic senator Thrasea Paetus. The manuscript breaks off in AD 66, during Thrasea's death; the final years of Nero are lost.
Book by book
Book 1: The Accession of Tiberius and the Mutinies
Chapters 1–81 (AD 14–15)
Summary
Tacitus opens with a sketch of Roman constitutional history, from the kings to Augustus, and declares his purpose: to treat the last years of Augustus and then Tiberius and his successors without bitterness or partiality. He reviews how Augustus gathered power into his own hands, how the heirs he favoured died one after another, and how Tiberius, his stepson, was left as the only candidate. Augustus dies at Nola; the first crime of the new reign is the murder of Agrippa Postumus, his last grandson.
At Rome the consuls, senators and knights hurry to swear allegiance. Tiberius, already in command of the guard, plays the reluctant heir in the Senate; at Augustus' funeral the talk of the crowd weighs the dead emperor's career for and against. In the Senate debate Tiberius speaks of sharing the burden of rule, and Asinius Gallus traps him by asking which part he wants.
Meanwhile the legions in Pannonia and on the Rhine mutiny, demanding shorter service and better pay. Drusus, Tiberius' son, quells the Pannonian mutiny with help from an eclipse of the moon; Germanicus, Tiberius' nephew and adopted son, faces the German legions, sends away his wife Agrippina and little son Gaius ('Caligula'), and lets the loyal soldiers butcher the guilty. He then leads the army across the Rhine, buries the bones of Varus' legions in the Teutoburg Forest, and barely escapes disaster on the way home. At Rome Tiberius revives the law of treason (maiestas).
Analysis
The preface is a statement of method and of moral position. Tacitus claims that the history of the Julio-Claudians was falsified while they lived, through fear, and after their deaths, through hatred; his own distance in time allows him to write 'sine ira et studio', 'without anger or partisanship'. Readers have always noticed that what follows is among the most pointed indictments of power in ancient literature, and the gap between the profession of impartiality and the narrative's force is part of the work's interest (Syme 1958) (Woodman 1988).
Book 1 also sets up the reign's central drama, the contest between appearance and reality. Tiberius' hesitation in the Senate is presented as a performance whose real meaning lies elsewhere: in the troops who already escort him, in his fear of Germanicus, in his memory for 'a word or a look'. The senators, for their part, must work hard not to seem to understand him. Tacitus teaches his reader to watch the gap between what is said and what is done (O'Gorman 2000).
Germanicus is introduced as Tiberius' opposite: open, warm, popular, and the bearer of the people's hopes for a return of freedom. The Teutoburg scene, with its whitening bones and skulls nailed to trees, is one of the great set pieces of Latin prose; it also reveals that Germanicus' passion for glory and his gestures of piety are not always wise, and Tiberius disapproves of the burial.
Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus—more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed.
Church and Brodribb's rendering of the famous programme sine ira et studio. Tacitus grounds his claim to impartiality on distance: he has no personal reason to love or hate the dead emperors.
How few were left who had seen the republic!
A single exclamation closes the review of Augustus' reign. A generation has grown up that knows only the principate; the old forms survive, but no one remembers what they meant.
Meanwhile at Rome people plunged into slavery--consuls, senators, knights. The higher a man's rank, the more eager his hypocrisy
The accession is told as a rush into servitude led by the elite. The theme of senatorial servility, here announced, runs through the whole work.
In the centre of the field were the whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps.
Germanicus visits the site of Varus' defeat (AD 9). The landscape preserves the story of the battle, and Tacitus reconstructs it from the arrangement of the dead.
Book 2: Germanicus in Germany and the East
Chapters 1–88 (AD 16–19)
Summary
Germanicus renews the German war, wins battles at Idistaviso and the Angrivarian wall against Arminius, but loses much of his fleet in a storm on the North Sea. Tiberius recalls him, grants him a triumph, and sends him to settle affairs in the East with overriding command. At the same time he appoints Gnaeus Piso, a proud and hostile noble, governor of Syria, accompanied by his wife Plancina, a friend of the emperor's mother Livia.
At Rome the young noble Libo Drusus is prosecuted for treason on evidence of astrology and magic and kills himself; the senators vote thanksgivings. In Africa the rebel Tacfarinas begins a long guerrilla war. In the East Germanicus crowns a king of Armenia and visits Egypt, which senators were forbidden to enter without the emperor's leave, and quarrels openly with Piso.
Germanicus falls ill at Antioch. Spells, human remains and lead tablets inscribed with his name are found in the walls of his room. Dying, he accuses Piso and Plancina of poisoning him and charges his friends to avenge him. He is compared with Alexander the Great. The book ends with the death of Arminius, murdered by his own people, and Tacitus' tribute to him as the liberator of Germany.
Analysis
Book 2 is built around Germanicus, a figure on whom Tacitus lavishes sympathy without allowing him to become simply a hero. His campaigns are glorious but inconclusive; his trip to Egypt is a breach of protocol; his deathbed speech is a masterpiece of public rhetoric, calculated to arm his followers against Piso. Tacitus never says that Tiberius ordered his death, but he arranges rumour, suspicion and juxtaposition so that the reader cannot stop wondering (Walker 1952) (Ginsburg 1981).
The closing chapter on Arminius shows Tacitus' capacity to honour an enemy. The German chief defied Rome at the height of its power and is still sung of by his people, though neglected by Greek and Roman historians. The remark that Romans 'extol the past and are indifferent to our own times' is also a defence of Tacitus' own project.
Tears for Germanicus even strangers will shed; vengeance must come from you, if you loved the man more than his fortune.
Germanicus' last words turn private grief into a political programme. The speech shapes the trial of Piso in Book 3 and the long enmity between Agrippina and Tiberius.
For men according as they pitied Germanicus and were prepossessed with suspicion or were biased by partiality towards Piso, gave conflicting accounts.
Even the corpse cannot settle whether there was poison. Tacitus repeatedly shows how evidence is read through prior loyalty.
Assuredly he was the deliverer of Germany, one too who had defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals, but in the height of her empire's glory
The obituary of Arminius, one of Rome's greatest enemies, given the honour of closing a book.
Book 3: The Ashes of Germanicus and the Trial of Piso
Chapters 1–76 (AD 20–22)
Summary
Agrippina lands at Brundisium with the urn containing her husband's ashes, and the whole of Italy turns out in mourning. The funeral at Rome becomes a demonstration of feeling for Agrippina and her children; Tiberius and Livia do not appear in public, and a curt edict asks the people to moderate their grief.
Piso is tried before the Senate. The charge of poisoning cannot be proved, but his conduct in Syria, including his attempt to recover the province by force, can. Abandoned by Tiberius, he is found dead with his throat cut; Plancina is spared at Livia's request. Tacitus records that the truth about the case was never settled.
The rest of the book follows senatorial business: the war with Tacfarinas, debates on luxury and on the right of asylum in Greek cities, a grant of tribunician power to Drusus, and many trials. Tacitus pauses to define the purpose of history and to record Tiberius' disgust at the senators' servility. The book ends with the funeral of Junia, niece of Cato and sister of Brutus.
Analysis
The Piso trial shows the Senate as a court working under the eye of the emperor, where everyone tries to read what Tiberius wants. Tacitus' handling of the case can now be checked against an inscription found in Spain in the 1980s, the Senate's own decree on Piso (the senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre), which gives the official version; the comparison has become a classic test of how Tacitus used and reshaped documentary sources (Woodman 2009).
Chapter 65 is Tacitus' clearest statement of history's moral function: to keep good actions from oblivion and to hold over bad words and deeds the fear of posterity's judgement. The final sentence of the book, on the missing images of Brutus and Cassius, is one of his most famous: what is absent outshines what is displayed.
When Agrippina descended from the vessel with her two children, clasping the funeral urn, with eyes riveted to the earth, there was one universal groan.
Grief becomes public theatre and public politics. The tableau of the widow with the urn is staged for the crowd, and Tacitus shows the crowd as uncertain how it should respond.
This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
Tacitus' programme for history: memory as reward and as punishment. It explains why he records so many senatorial motions, especially shameful ones.
How ready these men are to be slaves.
Tiberius' Greek remark about the Senate: even the man who profits from servility despises it.
But Cassius and Brutus outshone them all, from the very fact that their likenesses were not to be seen.
The images of the tyrannicides could not be carried in Junia's funeral procession. Their absence keeps the memory of the Republic alive more powerfully than any display.
Book 4: The Rise of Sejanus
Chapters 1–75 (AD 23–28)
Summary
Tacitus marks AD 23 as the turning point of the reign: Tiberius becomes a tyrant, and the cause is Aelius Sejanus, prefect of the praetorian guard. Sejanus concentrates the guard in one camp at Rome, seduces Livilla, wife of Tiberius' son Drusus, and with her help poisons Drusus. He then works against Agrippina and her sons, the heirs of Germanicus.
Trials multiply. The historian Cremutius Cordus is prosecuted for praising Brutus and Cassius, defends himself with a speech on free speech and the memory of the dead, and starves himself to death; his books are burned but survive. Tacitus pauses to complain that his subject is narrow and gloomy compared with the wars of the old Republic, yet insists that it is instructive.
Sejanus asks to marry Livilla and is refused. In AD 26 Tiberius leaves Rome for Campania and then the island of Capri, never to return to the city. When a cave collapses at a banquet, Sejanus shields the emperor with his body and wins his complete trust. The book closes with the treacherous entrapment of Titius Sabinus, a friend of Germanicus' family, and the marriage of the younger Agrippina to Domitius Ahenobarbus.
Analysis
The opening portrait of Sejanus borrows the shape of Sallust's portrait of Catiline: a list of contradictory qualities held together by ambition. Tacitus makes the minister both cause and symptom: he lets Tiberius' worst tendencies emerge, but chapter 57 admits that Tiberius stayed away from Rome for six years after Sejanus' fall, so the retirement may have been his own choice (Martin 1989).
The 'digression' of chapters 32–33 is a key text for understanding the Annals. Tacitus contrasts his material with the battles and political struggles of republican history and argues that, under a single ruler, the historian's task is to study small events from which great changes arise. The Cremutius Cordus episode that immediately follows dramatises the danger of writing history under a tyrant, and its conclusion, that persecution makes the persecuted famous, applies to Tacitus' own work (Sailor 2008).
Suddenly fortune deranged everything; the emperor became a cruel tyrant, as well as an abettor of cruelty in others.
The structural hinge of the Tiberian books: the reign is divided into a better and a worse half, and the turn is identified with Sejanus.
My labours are circumscribed and inglorious; peace wholly unbroken or but slightly disturbed, dismal misery in the capital, an emperor careless about the enlargement of the empire, such is my theme.
Tacitus admits the narrowness of his material, but the following chapter argues that it is useful precisely because it shows how men live under one ruler.
the persecution of genius fosters its influence; foreign tyrants, and all who have imitated their oppression, have merely procured infamy for themselves and glory for their victims.
Tacitus' comment after Cremutius Cordus' suicide and the burning of his books. It is a claim about the power of writing to outlast those who would suppress it.
I am often in doubt whether it is not to be more truly ascribed to himself, and his wish to hide by the place of his retreat the cruelty and licentiousness which he betrayed by his actions.
A rare moment where Tacitus openly weighs his sources against each other and partly withdraws the explanation he has just given.
Book 5: The Fragment: Livia's Death and Sejanus' Fall
Chapters 1–11, a fragment (AD 29–31)
Summary
Only a few chapters survive. Livia, now Julia Augusta, dies in old age, and Tacitus gives her a sharp obituary. With her restraining influence gone, Tiberius sends the Senate a letter attacking Agrippina and her son Nero; the people surround the Senate house carrying their images, and the senators hesitate.
There is then a gap in the manuscript which swallows the whole of AD 30 and most of 31, including the fall of Sejanus in October 31, when Tiberius sent a long letter to the Senate and had his minister arrested and executed. When the text resumes, the reprisals against Sejanus' friends and family are under way; his young children are put to death, a pretender claiming to be Drusus appears in the East, and the consuls quarrel.
Analysis
The loss of Sejanus' fall is the most painful gap in the Tiberian books, since Tacitus had built towards it since Book 4. What survives is still telling: the obituary of Livia is a model of Tacitean ambiguity, praising her domestic virtue while hinting at her ruthlessness, and the execution of Sejanus' daughter is told with deliberate restraint, letting the horror speak through a child's incomprehension (Goodyear 1972).
Students should note where the gap falls: between chapters 5 and 6 of Book 5. Chapter 6 opens in the middle of a speech by an unnamed defendant after Sejanus' fall, so the chapter numbers run on in sequence across years of lost narrative.
An imperious mother and an amiable wife, she was a match for the diplomacy of her husband and the dissimulation of her son.
Livia's obituary in one balanced sentence: each virtue is set against a vice, and her power is measured by the two men she matched.
the little girl, who was so unconscious that she continually asked what was her offence, and whither she was being dragged, saying that she would do so no more, and a childish chastisement was enough for her correction.
The punishment of Sejanus' children. Tacitus lets a child's voice expose the legal obscenity of the purge.
Book 6: The Last Years of Tiberius
Chapters 1–51 (AD 32–37)
Summary
After Sejanus' death the prosecutions continue. Tiberius writes to the Senate a letter of strange despair; the knight Marcus Terentius defends himself boldly for having been Sejanus' friend, arguing that everyone courted the man the emperor honoured. Agrippina dies in exile on Pandateria, and her son Drusus is starved to death in the palace, his last curses read out in the Senate.
There is a financial crisis in Rome, Parthian dynastic struggles in the East, and stories of the astrologer Thrasyllus, which lead Tacitus to reflect on fate and chance. Tiberius lingers in Campania while the praetorian prefect Macro courts the young Gaius (Caligula). At Misenum in March 37 the dying emperor revives unexpectedly and is smothered by Macro. Tacitus closes the Tiberian books with an obituary that divides his life into stages.
Analysis
The final obituary explains Tiberius' life as a gradual unmasking: good in private life, then secretive while Germanicus and Drusus lived, then a mixture of good and evil while his mother lived, cruel but discreet while he loved or feared Sejanus, and finally open in his vices. The scheme implies that his nature was bad from the start and only concealed; modern historians such as Barbara Levick have argued that this interpretation does injustice to a capable and conscientious ruler (Levick 1976).
The letter of chapter 6 gives Tacitus one of his most powerful moments: the ruler of the world confesses that he does not know what to write. Tacitus reads it through the Platonic image of the tyrant's soul scarred by its own cruelty, so that the emperor's misery becomes a punishment in itself.
May all the gods and goddesses destroy me more miserably than I feel myself to be daily perishing
The opening of Tiberius' letter, quoted in his own words: the ruler of the world goes on to confess that he does not know what to write to the Senate. Tacitus lets the emperor's own sentence expose his mind.
I suspend my judgment on the question whether it is fate and unchangeable necessity or chance which governs the revolutions of human affairs.
A philosophical digression prompted by the astrologer Thrasyllus. Tacitus' uncertainty about fate and the gods is typical of the Annals.
Finally, he plunged into every wickedness and disgrace, when fear and shame being cast off, he simply indulged his own inclinations.
The final stage of the obituary. Tacitus' scheme of a gradually revealed nature has shaped every later portrait of Tiberius.
Book 11: Claudius and Messalina
Chapters 1–38 (AD 47–48)
Summary
Books 7 to 10, covering the rest of AD 37 to 47, including the whole reign of Gaius (Caligula) and the first years of Claudius, are lost. Book 11 opens in the middle of the destruction of the ex-consul Valerius Asiaticus, engineered by Claudius' wife Messalina. Claudius acts as censor, adds three new letters to the alphabet, celebrates the Secular Games, and argues in the Senate that leading men of Gaul should be admitted to the Senate; Tacitus gives his version of the speech.
Messalina, bored with ordinary adultery, publicly marries her lover Gaius Silius while Claudius is away at Ostia. The freedman Narcissus persuades Claudius' mistresses to tell him and takes control of the crisis. During a Bacchic vintage festival in Silius' house the news arrives that Claudius is returning. Messalina is killed in the gardens of Lucullus on Narcissus' orders; Claudius, at dinner, calls for more wine and never mentions her again.
Analysis
Claudius' speech on the Gallic senators can be compared with the bronze Lyon Tablet, which preserves part of what he actually said. Tacitus kept the argument but rewrote it into tighter and more eloquent prose, giving the emperor a better speech than he gave. The comparison shows both the historian's freedom with speeches and his respect for their substance (Malloch 2013).
The fall of Messalina is narrated like a farce turning into tragedy, with a mock wedding, a vintage festival and a storm seen from a tree. Tacitus admits that the story sounds incredible and insists that it is true. The real power, as so often under Claudius, lies with freedmen, and the final picture of an emperor unmoved by the death of his wife makes Claudius' passivity the scene's last horror (Levick 1990).
Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, was so wise that he fought as enemies and then hailed as fellow-citizens several nations on the very same day.
From Claudius' speech: Rome's greatness rests on admitting outsiders. It is one of the most generous statements of Roman identity in ancient literature.
Messalina with flowing hair shook the thyrsus, and Silius at her side, crowned with ivy and wearing the buskin, moved his head to some lascivious chorus.
The Bacchic festival in Silius' house: an empress turned into a maenad, and a court turned into a theatre.
Nor did he ask the question, but called for the cup and finished his repast as usual.
Claudius hears of Messalina's death. His indifference, later confirmed by the Senate's erasure of her name, is the book's chilling end.
Book 12: Agrippina's Ascendancy
Chapters 1–69 (AD 48–54)
Summary
The freedmen compete to choose Claudius a new wife. Pallas' candidate wins: Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus and Claudius' own niece. The Senate changes the law to allow marriage between uncle and niece. Agrippina has Seneca recalled from exile to tutor her son Lucius Domitius, who is adopted by Claudius as Nero, betrothed to Claudius' daughter Octavia, and promoted ahead of Claudius' son Britannicus.
In Britain the resistance leader Caratacus is betrayed, brought to Rome and pardoned after a dignified speech before the emperor. Agrippina eliminates rivals, including Lepida, Nero's aunt. Prodigies announce change. When Claudius drops hints that he will punish his wives, Agrippina has him poisoned with mushrooms prepared by the poisoner Locusta, finished off by a doctor. Nero is acclaimed emperor by the praetorians at noon on 13 October 54.
Analysis
Tacitus presents Agrippina as a new kind of power at court: unlike Messalina she is not lascivious but ruthlessly controlled, and her rule is described as 'masculine'. The language reveals Roman assumptions about gender as much as it reveals Agrippina; scholars have studied how Tacitus uses the stereotype of the domineering woman to criticise the system that made such power possible (Barrett 1996) (Ginsburg 1981) (Santoro L'Hoir 2006).
Claudius' death is a study in how rumour becomes history. Tacitus notes that the details became widely known and reports them as the account of writers of the time, ending with the cynical maxim that great crimes are dangerous at the start but rewarded when complete.
It was a stringent, and, so to say, masculine despotism; there was sternness and generally arrogance in public, no sort of immodesty at home, unless it conduced to power.
Agrippina's regime defined by contrast with Messalina's. The phrase 'masculine despotism' has become central to discussions of Tacitus and women.
who could give her son empire but could not endure that he should be emperor
The paradox that will destroy Agrippina: she wants Nero to rule only as long as she rules through him.
for he knew that the greatest crimes are perilous in their inception, but well rewarded after their consummation.
The doctor Xenophon's motive. The epigram sums up the logic of the court.
Book 13: Nero's Early Reign and the Murder of Britannicus
Chapters 1–58 (AD 54–58)
Summary
The new reign opens with a murder, of Junius Silanus, arranged by Agrippina. Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus guide the young emperor and restrain his mother. Nero delivers a speech written by Seneca promising good government, and gives the watchword 'the best of mothers'. Agrippina's influence declines as Nero falls in love with the freedwoman Acte; Pallas is dismissed.
Agrippina threatens to champion Britannicus. At a family dinner Nero has his stepbrother poisoned, explaining that the boy has had an epileptic fit; Britannicus is buried that night. Agrippina is removed from the palace. Corbulo begins operations in Armenia. Nero roams the streets at night in disguise, beating passers-by. He falls for Poppaea Sabina, wife of his friend Otho, and sends Otho away to govern Lusitania.
Analysis
The early years of Nero were remembered in antiquity as a good period, and Tacitus does not hide the competent government of Seneca and Burrus. But he lets the murders frame the narrative: the reign begins with Silanus and turns with Britannicus. The poisoning scene is a theatre of watching, in which the guests' reactions to Nero are as revealing as Nero's own composure (Bartsch 1994) (Griffin 1984).
The introduction of Poppaea follows the Sallustian portrait technique used for Sejanus. 'She had everything but a right mind': her beauty, wealth and wit are listed only to be undone by the final judgement. With her, the stage is set for Agrippina's death.
These two men guided the emperor's youth with an unity of purpose seldom found where authority is shared
Seneca and Burrus as the regents of the early principate. Tacitus gives them credit, while noting that their policy was to channel Nero's vices into harmless indulgences.
those whose discernment was keener, remained motionless, with their eyes fixed on Nero
The murder of Britannicus. The guests' stillness shows that the court has learned to read the emperor's face.
This Poppaea had everything but a right mind.
The verdict that closes the list of her advantages. Poppaea's ambitions will drive the crimes of Book 14.
Book 14: The Murder of Agrippina, Boudicca, and Octavia
Chapters 1–65 (AD 59–62)
Summary
Urged on by Poppaea, Nero resolves to kill his mother. The freedman Anicetus designs a ship that will collapse at sea; on a calm starlit night near Baiae the ceiling falls and the boat founders, but Agrippina swims to safety. Nero, terrified, sends Anicetus to finish the job; she offers her womb to the sword. Nero's letter to the Senate, drafted by Seneca, claims she plotted against him, and the senators vote thanksgivings. Nero performs as singer and charioteer.
In Britain Suetonius Paulinus attacks the Druid island of Mona; behind his back the Iceni, led by their queen Boudicca, whose daughters had been raped and who had herself been flogged, rise with other tribes, sack Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium, and are crushed in a pitched battle. At Rome the city prefect Pedanius Secundus is murdered by a slave, and the Senate debates and approves the ancient custom of executing all the slaves of the household.
Burrus dies; Seneca asks to retire and offers his wealth back, but Nero refuses with false warmth. The infamous Tigellinus becomes prefect. Nero divorces Octavia, marries Poppaea, and has Octavia exiled to Pandateria on a false charge of adultery and murdered there, aged twenty.
Analysis
The murder of Agrippina is the darkest episode of the Neronian books and among the most dramatic in Latin historiography. Tacitus stages it like tragedy, with a peaceful night that seems to expose the crime, the failed shipwreck, the dark room with its single lamp, and the mother's last defiant gesture. The closing anecdote, Agrippina's reply to the astrologers, lets her own ambition write her epitaph (Santoro L'Hoir 2006).
The British chapters give a speech to a non-Roman woman and set her claims of freedom against Roman lust and greed, a pattern Tacitus also uses in the Agricola. The slave debate shows the Senate at its most traditional and most brutal. The death of Octavia ends with Tacitus' bitter rule for readers: under Nero, every thanksgiving to the gods marked a public disaster.
A night of brilliant starlight with the calm of a tranquil sea was granted by heaven, seemingly, to convict the crime.
The weather denies Nero the cover of a storm: nature itself seems to bear witness.
Then, as the centurion bared his sword for the fatal deed, presenting her person, she exclaimed, "Smite my womb," and with many wounds she was slain.
Agrippina's last words point to the womb that bore Nero. The gesture turns the murder into an image of parricide.
"Let him kill her," she said, "provided he is emperor."
The astrologers' prophecy, remembered after the event. Agrippina's choice of power over life is the key to her character as Tacitus draws it.
This is a woman's resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.
Boudicca's speech before the final battle. Freedom and slavery, the work's central terms, are heard from the other side of the empire.
as often as the emperor directed banishments or executions, so often was there a thanksgiving to the gods, and what formerly commemorated some prosperous event, was then a token of public disaster.
After Octavia's murder Tacitus tells readers how to read the official record: its language of rejoicing has been inverted.
Book 15: The Fire of Rome and the Pisonian Conspiracy
Chapters 1–74 (AD 62–65)
Summary
In the East Corbulo and the incompetent Caesennius Paetus struggle with Parthia over Armenia; a settlement makes the Parthian prince Tiridates king if he receives his crown from Nero. At Rome Nero sings in public at Naples and holds a lavish banquet staged by Tigellinus on a pool. In July 64 a fire breaks out by the Circus Maximus and rages for five days before it is checked, then flares up again; of Rome's fourteen districts only four escape. Nero opens his gardens to the homeless, but a rumour spreads that he sang of the fall of Troy as the city burned. He builds his Golden House on the ruins and rebuilds the city on a new plan.
To divert suspicion Nero blames the Christians, who are tortured and killed in his gardens, some burned as torches at night. In AD 65 a conspiracy forms to put Gaius Calpurnius Piso on the throne. It is betrayed by delay and indiscretion. The freedwoman Epicharis endures torture without naming anyone, while senators and knights betray their friends. Seneca, implicated, is ordered to die and opens his veins with his wife Paulina; the poet Lucan and many others perish. The praetorian tribune Subrius Flavus tells Nero why he hated him.
Analysis
Tacitus refuses to say whether Nero started the fire. He reports both versions, gives Nero credit for relief measures and sensible rebuilding, but places the rumour of the song of Troy and the Golden House where they do most damage. The method is typical: an explicit suspension of judgement combined with an arrangement of material that steers the reader (Champlin 2003) (Griffin 1984).
Chapter 44 is the earliest pagan reference to Christ that is generally accepted as genuine, and a key document for early Christian history. Tacitus calls the Christians hateful and their belief a 'superstition', yet the sentence that ends the chapter shows sympathy for the victims, since they died to satisfy one man's cruelty. Some scholars have questioned whether the victims were really identified as Christians in 64, or whether later knowledge of the movement shaped the account (Shaw 2015).
The deaths in the Pisonian conspiracy are a gallery of contrasting exits. The freedwoman Epicharis puts the nobles to shame; Seneca performs a philosopher's death modelled on Socrates, with its echo of the hemlock; Subrius Flavus speaks with a soldier's bluntness. Tacitus quotes the soldier's words because, unlike Seneca's, they had not been published (Griffin 1976).
A disaster followed, whether accidental or treacherously contrived by the emperor, is uncertain, as authors have given both accounts
The fire narrative opens with an explicit admission that the sources disagree.
the emperor appeared on a private stage and sang of the destruction of Troy, comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity.
The rumour behind the later legend of Nero 'fiddling' while Rome burned. Tacitus reports it as a rumour, not as fact.
Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus
The earliest generally accepted pagan reference to the execution of Christ.
for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed.
Tacitus despises the Christians but condemns the punishment, which aroused pity even for those he thought guilty.
I began to hate you when you became the murderer of your mother and your wife, a charioteer, an actor, and an incendiary.
Subrius Flavus to Nero. The list of crimes moves from murder to performance to arson, a soldier's judgement of the whole reign.
Book 16: Petronius, Thrasea, and the Lost End
Chapters 1–35, breaking off (AD 65–66)
Summary
Nero is deceived by a Carthaginian who claims to have found Dido's treasure. He performs at the second Neronia; Poppaea dies after he kicks her while she is pregnant. The condemnations continue: the jurist Cassius Longinus is exiled, the young Lucius Silanus is killed, Antistius Vetus and his family are driven to suicide, and Lucan's father Mela dies. Petronius, Nero's arbiter of elegance, is accused by Tigellinus and opens his veins at Cumae, chatting about light verse and sending Nero a sealed list of his debaucheries.
Nero finally moves against Thrasea Paetus, the most famous Stoic senator, and Barea Soranus. Thrasea is condemned in a Senate surrounded by soldiers. At home in his garden, talking with the Cynic Demetrius about the soul, he receives the decree, opens his veins and offers a libation of his blood to Jupiter the Liberator. The manuscript breaks off in the middle of a sentence as he turns to Demetrius. The rest of the Annals, which probably reached the death of Nero in AD 68, is lost.
Analysis
Petronius' death is a deliberate inversion of the philosophical death: instead of discourse on the immortality of the soul, he listens to frivolous poems; instead of flattering the emperor in his will, he exposes him. The episode is the main evidence for identifying him with the author of the Satyricon, though Tacitus never mentions the novel (Ash 2006).
Thrasea's death mirrors Seneca's, and his words to the young quaestor, that he has been born into times in which one must strengthen the spirit with examples of courage, could stand as an epigraph for the whole work. The book's preface on the 'monotony' of death and passive submission (chapter 16) shows Tacitus anxious that his reader may tire of so many tame deaths, and resolved nonetheless to record each one (Haynes 2003).
But now a servile submissiveness and so much wanton bloodshed at home fatigue the mind and paralyze it with grief.
Tacitus' weariness at his own subject. He asks only not to be thought to hate men who died so tamely.
And he listened to them as they repeated, not thoughts on the immortality of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light poetry and playful verses.
Petronius' death parodies the philosopher's death of Seneca and Socrates.
Behold, young man, and may the gods avert the omen, but you have been born into times in which it is well to fortify the spirit with examples of courage.
Thrasea's last recorded words, spoken almost at the point where the manuscript breaks off.
Characters
The historian
- Tacitus (the narrator)
- A senator writing under Trajan and Hadrian about the first emperors. He comments directly, weighs sources, reports rumours, and reflects on fate and on the purpose of history. His voice, ironic, grave and often indignant, is the most continuous presence in the work.
The imperial house
- Augustus
- The first princeps, who dies in Book 1. Tacitus presents the debate over his reign through the opinions of 'sensible men' at his funeral: some praise him as the restorer of peace, others see a usurper who disguised monarchy under republican forms.
- Livia (Julia Augusta)
- Wife of Augustus and mother of Tiberius. Tacitus hints that she may have removed rivals to her son's succession; she protects Plancina after the death of Germanicus and restrains Tiberius until her death in AD 29.
- Tiberius
- Emperor AD 14–37. Intelligent, experienced and secretive, he speaks obscurely and is constantly suspected of hiding his true intentions. Tacitus portrays a gradual revelation of a cruel nature, ending in retreat to Capri and a terror of prosecutions.
- Germanicus
- Nephew and adopted son of Tiberius, a popular general and the people's hope for a milder future. He quells the Rhine mutinies, campaigns in Germany and dies in Syria in AD 19, believing himself poisoned. Tacitus shows his charm and his impulsiveness.
- Agrippina the Elder
- Granddaughter of Augustus and wife of Germanicus, proud, courageous and impatient. She returns with his ashes and leads the party hostile to Tiberius and Sejanus; exiled to Pandateria, she dies in AD 33.
- Drusus the Younger
- Tiberius' son, rough but capable, who puts down the Pannonian mutiny. Poisoned in AD 23 by Sejanus with the help of his wife Livilla.
- Claudius
- Emperor AD 41–54, a learned antiquarian presented as weak and manipulated by his wives and freedmen. His speech on the Gallic senators shows a more statesmanlike side. He is poisoned by Agrippina.
- Messalina
- Claudius' third wife, notorious for her adulteries, who destroys enemies by prosecutions and finally marries Gaius Silius publicly. She is killed on the orders of the freedman Narcissus in AD 48.
- Agrippina the Younger
- Daughter of Germanicus, sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero. Calculating and ambitious, she secures the throne for her son and poisons Claudius, then loses influence and is murdered by Nero in AD 59.
- Nero
- Emperor AD 54–68. Guided at first by Seneca and Burrus, he murders Britannicus, his mother and Octavia, performs as singer and charioteer, and is suspected of the fire of Rome. His reign in the surviving books ends with the purge after the Pisonian conspiracy.
- Britannicus and Octavia
- Children of Claudius and Messalina. Britannicus is poisoned at dinner by Nero in AD 55; Octavia, Nero's wife, is divorced, exiled and murdered in AD 62.
- Poppaea Sabina
- Beautiful, rich and ambitious, wife first of Otho and then of Nero. She urges the murders of Agrippina and Octavia and dies in AD 65 after Nero kicks her.
Court and Senate
- Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso and Plancina
- Governor of Syria and his wife, enemies of Germanicus, accused of poisoning him. Piso dies before the verdict, probably by suicide; Plancina is saved by Livia's intervention and dies years later.
- Sejanus
- Lucius Aelius Sejanus, praetorian prefect and the trusted minister of Tiberius, who aspires to marry into the imperial family. He destroys the family of Germanicus before his own sudden fall in AD 31, in a passage now lost.
- Cremutius Cordus
- Historian prosecuted in AD 25 for praising Brutus and Cassius. His speech in his own defence is an argument for the freedom of historical writing; he starves himself to death, and his burned books survive.
- Narcissus and Pallas
- Imperial freedmen of enormous wealth and influence under Claudius. Narcissus destroys Messalina; Pallas promotes Agrippina's marriage and Nero's adoption. Their power is, for Tacitus, a sign of a world turned upside down.
- Seneca
- Stoic philosopher, tutor and adviser of Nero, who with Burrus governs well in the early reign but is compromised by the murder of Agrippina. He retires, is implicated in the Pisonian conspiracy and dies in AD 65, in a scene modelled on the death of Socrates.
- Burrus and Tigellinus
- Praetorian prefects. Burrus, a soldier of severe manners, shares the early guidance of Nero with Seneca; after his death in AD 62 Tigellinus, Nero's companion in vice, becomes the evil genius of the reign.
- Epicharis
- A freedwoman involved in the Pisonian conspiracy who resists torture and kills herself rather than betray anyone, putting to shame the senators who betrayed their friends.
- Petronius
- Nero's 'arbiter of elegance', a man of refined luxury and proven competence, who is destroyed by Tigellinus' envy and dies with ironic calm in AD 66. He is usually identified with the author of the Satyricon.
- Thrasea Paetus
- Stoic senator whose silent protests and walkouts make him the symbol of independence. Condemned in AD 66, he dies in his garden, and the surviving text breaks off at his death.
Generals and enemies
- Corbulo
- Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, Nero's leading general, who fights in Armenia and against Parthia. He is the model of the old Roman commander in a degenerate age.
- Arminius, Caratacus and Boudicca
- Leaders of resistance to Rome in Germany and Britain. Tacitus gives them dignity and even eloquence: Arminius is called 'the deliverer of Germany', Caratacus wins his pardon by a speech, and Boudicca speaks for freedom against Roman greed and lust.
Themes
Dissimulation: the Gap between Words and Reality
The Annals are a study in hypocrisy. Under the principate, power is exercised behind republican forms: the Senate meets, consuls are elected, laws are passed, but decisions are made in the palace. Tacitus constantly contrasts what people say with what they mean, and exposes official language, the 'modest' edict, the 'reluctant' accession, the 'thanksgiving' for a murder, as a mask.
Tiberius is the master of dissimulation, but everyone learns the art: senators who must not appear to understand, courtiers who watch faces at dinner, Nero who embraces Seneca while hating him. Tacitus' own irony is the historian's answer to this world: he forces the reader to read beneath the surface (O'Gorman 2000) (Haynes 2003).
Liberty and Servitude
The work's central opposition is between libertas, the freedom associated with the Republic and the Senate, and servitium, the slavishness of a society governed by one man. Tacitus gives special attention to the servility of the upper classes, who compete in flattery, and records shameful senatorial motions precisely so that posterity may judge them.
Freedom survives in unexpected places: in the defiance of enemies such as Arminius and Boudicca, in the courage of a freedwoman like Epicharis, in the silent protests of Thrasea. Tacitus is not a simple republican, since he accepts that the empire needs one ruler, but he measures every reign by the space it leaves for free speech and dignity (Syme 1958) (Sailor 2008).
Memory, Posterity and the Purpose of History
For Tacitus, history is a moral tribunal: it rewards virtue with remembrance and punishes vice with infamy. The Cremutius Cordus episode and the funeral of Junia show that power cannot control memory, and that suppression only increases the fame of its victims.
The Annals thus present themselves as a record of what the official accounts conceal. Tacitus notes the speeches published by Seneca and declines to paraphrase them, but quotes the soldier Subrius Flavus because no one else did; he asks posterity to grant each victim a separate memorial (Woodman 2009).
Death and the Manner of Dying
The surviving books are full of deaths: murders, executions, suicides compelled by the emperor. Tacitus pays close attention to how each person dies, because under tyranny the manner of death becomes one of the last areas of freedom and self-expression.
Some deaths are philosophical performances (Seneca, Thrasea), some are ironic parodies (Petronius), some are courageous resistance (Epicharis), and some are cowardly. The tradition of 'exitus' literature, accounts of the last moments of famous men, is part of the background; Tacitus both uses and questions it, wondering whether such deaths do any good (Griffin 1976).
Women and Power
The imperial women, Livia, the two Agrippinas, Messalina, Poppaea, have influence because the principate is a family business. Tacitus represents their power as unnatural and dangerous, using the Roman stereotype of the domineering woman, and many of his female portraits rely on charges of poisoning and sexual misconduct.
Modern scholars read these portraits as evidence both of the real influence of women at court and of Roman anxieties about power exercised outside the traditional male institutions (Ginsburg 1981) (Barrett 1996) (Santoro L'Hoir 2006).
Fortune, Fate and the Gods
Tacitus is uncertain whether human affairs are governed by fate, chance or divine will. He reports prodigies and omens, sometimes seriously, sometimes with scepticism, and he suggests that the gods are concerned more with punishing Rome than with protecting it.
This uncertainty adds to the sense of a world out of human control, in which even the emperor's power is precarious and history moves through small causes and accidents (Martin 1981).
Motifs
Treason trials and informers
The law of maiestas, revived in Book 1, becomes the instrument of terror. Professional accusers (delatores) profit from prosecutions, and the repeated scenes of trial, condemnation and suicide give the Tiberian and Neronian books their oppressive rhythm.
Rumour
Tacitus reports what 'people said' as well as what happened: rumours about poison, about the fire, about Nero's song. Rumour lets him suggest what he cannot prove and shows how public opinion forms under a secretive regime.
Theatre and spectacle
Politics in the Annals is constantly staged: Tiberius' performance of reluctance, Agrippina's landing with the urn, Messalina's Bacchic festival, Nero's singing and chariot racing. Under Nero the metaphor becomes literal as the emperor takes the stage (Bartsch 1994).
Letters and documents
Emperors govern by letters from a distance, especially Tiberius on Capri. Letters to the Senate, wills, decrees and speeches are quoted or summarised, and Tacitus reads them against their authors.
Prodigies and portents
Lightning, monstrous births, comets and swarms of bees announce disasters. Tacitus records them as part of the annalistic tradition and uses them to darken the atmosphere before great crimes.
Symbols
Germanicus' funeral urn
Carried by Agrippina at Brundisium, the urn becomes a symbol of the lost hope of a better ruler and of the grievance of Germanicus' family against Tiberius.
The missing images of Brutus and Cassius
At Junia's funeral the tyrannicides' masks cannot be displayed; their absence keeps the memory of the Republic more vivid than any presence.
The collapsing ship
Nero's device for killing his mother is a perverse work of art, a stage machine turned to murder. Its failure, on a calm starlit night, exposes the crime.
The Golden House
Nero's palace built on the ruins of the city after the fire symbolises the emperor's appropriation of public space and his love of the impossible.
Critical debates
How impartial is Tacitus?
Tacitus claims to write 'without anger or partisanship', yet few historians are more openly judgemental. Some scholars take the claim as a conventional formula, others as a genuine ideal compromised by his experience of Domitian, whose terror he projects back onto Tiberius.
Ronald Syme presented Tacitus as a senator of deep political insight whose bias was that of his class; more recent work emphasises his literary techniques of insinuation, by which he can report facts favourable to an emperor while undermining them (Syme 1958) (Martin 1981) (O'Gorman 2000).
The real Tiberius
Tacitus' Tiberius is a dissembler whose true nature is gradually revealed. Modern historians have pointed out that the facts he reports often show a responsible administrator, careful with public money, reluctant to accept honours, and moderate in many trials.
Barbara Levick's biography made the most influential case for a more positive assessment, reading his reign as a sincere but failed attempt to govern with the Senate (Levick 1976) (Woodman 2009).
History or rhetoric?
Ancient historiography was regarded as a branch of rhetoric. A. J. Woodman argued that Roman historians were expected to elaborate a core of facts with plausible details, and that Tacitus' narratives should be read as rhetorical constructions rather than records.
Others defend Tacitus' reliability on matters of fact, as shown by his use of senatorial records and by comparisons with inscriptions. The debate concerns not only Tacitus but the nature of ancient history itself (Woodman 1988) (Luce 1993).
Tacitus' use of documents: Piso and the Lyon Tablet
Two inscriptions allow a direct comparison with Tacitus: the Senate's decree on the condemnation of Piso (AD 20), found in Spain, and the bronze tablet at Lyon preserving Claudius' speech on the Gallic senators (AD 48).
In both cases Tacitus clearly had access to the substance of the documents, but reshaped them: he condenses Claudius' rambling speech into a coherent argument and shifts the emphasis of the Piso affair. Scholars differ on whether these changes reveal a historian's critical judgement or a writer's artistic freedom (Malloch 2013) (Woodman 2009).
Nero, the fire and the Christians
Tacitus leaves open whether Nero started the fire of 64, while other ancient writers, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, blame him directly. Many modern scholars doubt his guilt, noting among other things that the fire also destroyed his own palace.
The passage on the Christians (15.44) is almost universally accepted as genuine, and the Medicean manuscript appears to show that 'Christianos' was corrected from an original 'Chrestianos'. Brent Shaw argued that the story of a Neronian persecution of Christians as such owes more to the situation of Tacitus' own day than to the events of 64; others have defended the traditional account (Shaw 2015) (Champlin 2003) (Griffin 1984).
Women in the Annals
Tacitus' imperial women have often been read as realistic portraits of powerful figures. Feminist and rhetorical approaches have instead shown how they are shaped by literary stereotypes, the poisoner, the adulteress, the domineering mother, and by the function they serve in the narrative as symbols of corrupted power.
Judith Ginsburg's study of the younger Agrippina and Francesca Santoro L'Hoir's work on tragic patterns in the Annals have been especially influential (Ginsburg 1981) (Santoro L'Hoir 2006) (Barrett 1996).
The lost books and the shape of the whole
The surviving books are only about two-thirds of the work. Books 7–10 (Gaius and the early years of Claudius) are lost, as is the end, after AD 66. A notice in Jerome says that the Annals and Histories together contained thirty books; scholars therefore debate whether the Annals had sixteen books (with fourteen for the Histories) or eighteen, perhaps unfinished at Tacitus' death.
The structural question matters for interpretation: the work seems to be built in hexads (groups of six books), with Tiberius occupying Books 1–6, and the question of whether Tacitus finished Nero's reign affects how we read the last surviving books (Syme 1958) (Martin 1989) (Goodyear 1972).
Seneca: philosopher or hypocrite?
Seneca's role in the Annals is ambiguous. He governs well with Burrus, but he drafts Nero's justification for the murder of Agrippina and accumulates a vast fortune while preaching Stoic moderation.
Tacitus gives him a noble death but signals that it was carefully staged for posterity. Miriam Griffin's study placed Seneca's political career in its historical context and explored the relationship between his philosophical writings and his compromises (Griffin 1976) (Ash 2006).
Key passages
without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed.
Church and Brodribb's version of the famous phrase sine ira et studio. Tacitus claims impartiality because he is distant in time from the emperors he describes. The claim has shaped all later discussion of his reliability, and readers have always weighed it against the intensity of his judgements.
Meanwhile at Rome people plunged into slavery--consuls, senators, knights.
The reaction to Tiberius' accession. The sentence establishes the theme of servility and shows the nobility rushing to embrace the new regime. Note the order of ranks: the highest come first.
This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
Tacitus' definition of the purpose of history. It is a moral purpose: history preserves good deeds and punishes evil ones through the judgement of posterity.
But Cassius and Brutus outshone them all, from the very fact that their likenesses were not to be seen.
The end of Book 3, at Junia's funeral. The images of the tyrannicides are forbidden, but their absence makes them more visible. A paradigm of Tacitus' epigrammatic style and of his theme of memory against power.
To every man posterity gives his due honour
From the historian's defence before the Senate. Cordus appeals to the judgement of posterity, the same tribunal Tacitus invokes for his own work. The survival of his books proves him right.
Finally, he plunged into every wickedness and disgrace, when fear and shame being cast off, he simply indulged his own inclinations.
The conclusion of Tiberius' obituary. It sums up Tacitus' view of the emperor's character as gradually revealed. The interpretation has been challenged by modern historians.
who could give her son empire but could not endure that he should be emperor
On the younger Agrippina. The paradox captures her ambition and anticipates her destruction: once Nero is emperor, he will not accept her control.
"Let him kill her," she said, "provided he is emperor."
Agrippina's reply to the astrologers' prophecy that Nero would rule and kill her. Told after her murder, it reveals her readiness to sacrifice everything, even her life, for her son's power.
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.
The beginning of the famous passage on the persecution of the Christians after the fire. Tacitus despises the Christians but suggests Nero used them as scapegoats. The passage is a key document for the early history of Christianity.
you have been born into times in which it is well to fortify the spirit with examples of courage.
Thrasea's words to the young quaestor sent to announce his condemnation. Among the last surviving words of the Annals, they express the purpose of the whole work: to provide examples of courage for times of tyranny.
Questions for study
How far does Tacitus live up to his promise to write 'without anger or partisanship'?
Look at how he handles rumours and alternative explanations, such as the death of Germanicus, Tiberius' retirement and the fire. Does he report facts favourable to the emperors? How does he shape the reader's judgement?
How does Tacitus portray Tiberius' character, and how convincing is the obituary in Book 6?
Consider the scheme of gradual revelation, the role of dissimulation, and the evidence within the narrative for good government.
What is the function of Germanicus in Books 1–3?
Compare him with Tiberius. Think about his popularity, his campaigns, his death and the use of his memory by Agrippina.
Why does Tacitus devote so much space to the Senate and the treason trials?
Consider his statement of history's purpose at 3.65, his complaint about his narrow subject at 4.32–33, and the theme of servility.
What does the Cremutius Cordus episode suggest about the relationship between history and power?
Compare Cordus' situation with Tacitus' own, and consider the comment at 4.35 on the burning of books.
How does Tacitus use the women of the imperial house to characterise the regimes of Claudius and Nero?
Compare Messalina and Agrippina (12.7), and consider the stereotypes of the poisoner and the adulteress.
How does Tacitus narrate the murder of Agrippina, and what makes the scene so effective?
Look at the setting, the failure of the ship, the details of the final scene and the closing anecdote about the astrologers.
What does the passage on the fire and the Christians reveal about Tacitus' methods and attitudes?
Note the uncertainty about Nero's guilt, the rumour of the song of Troy, his contempt for the Christians and his sympathy for their suffering.
Compare the deaths of Seneca, Petronius and Thrasea. What do they suggest about how to live and die under tyranny?
Consider philosophy and its parody, the role of audiences, and Tacitus' remarks on passive deaths at 16.16.
How does the loss of Books 7–10 and the end of Book 16 affect our reading of the Annals?
Think about the fall of Sejanus in Book 5, the missing reign of Gaius, and how the work might have ended with Nero's death.
Further reading
- Ash, Rhiannon. Tacitus. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2006.
- Barrett, Anthony A. Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. London: Batsford, 1996.
- Bartsch, Shadi. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
- Champlin, Edward. Nero. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Ginsburg, Judith. Tradition and Theme in the Annals of Tacitus. New York: Arno Press, 1981.
- Goodyear, F. R. D., ed. The Annals of Tacitus, Books 1–6. Vol. 1, Annals 1.1–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
- Griffin, Miriam T. Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
- Griffin, Miriam T. Nero: The End of a Dynasty. London: Batsford, 1984.
- Haynes, Holly. The History of Make-Believe: Tacitus on Imperial Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
- Levick, Barbara. Tiberius the Politician. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.
- Levick, Barbara. Claudius. London: Batsford, 1990.
- Luce, T. J., and A. J. Woodman, eds. Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
- Malloch, S. J. V., ed. The Annals of Tacitus, Book 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Martin, Ronald. Tacitus. London: Batsford, 1981.
- Martin, R. H., and A. J. Woodman, eds. Tacitus: Annals Book IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
- Mellor, Ronald. Tacitus. New York: Routledge, 1993.
- O'Gorman, Ellen. Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Pagán, Victoria Emma, ed. A Companion to Tacitus. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
- Sailor, Dylan. Writing and Empire in Tacitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Santoro L'Hoir, Francesca. Tragedy, Rhetoric, and the Historiography of Tacitus' Annales. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
- Shaw, Brent D. "The Myth of the Neronian Persecution." Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015): 73–100.
- Syme, Ronald. Tacitus. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.
- Walker, B. The Annals of Tacitus: A Study in the Writing of History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952.
- Woodman, A. J. Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies. London: Croom Helm, 1988.
- Woodman, A. J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-21.