Annals

Overview

The Annals cover the years 14 to 68, from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero, and they survive in pieces. We have Books I to VI on Tiberius, with a gap, nothing on Caligula, the second half of Claudius’ reign, and Nero’s down to 66. The end is lost.

Tacitus was a senator and consul who rose under Domitian, an emperor he loathed, and wrote after Domitian was dead. That position, a man who prospered under a tyranny and outlived it, is in every page. He is not a republican firebrand; he is someone who knows what survival costs.

The prose is the most distinctive in Latin: compressed to the point of obscurity, asymmetrical where Cicero would balance, and organised so the damaging word arrives last. He states his method in the first chapter: to write without anger and partiality, from which he has no reason to depart. This is not true, and he knows it is not true, and saying it is part of the method.

What happens

Books I to VI follow Tiberius, and they are the heart of the work. Augustus dies, and Tiberius goes through an elaborate performance of reluctance while the senate begs him to rule, a scene Tacitus renders with contempt for everyone in the room. The legions on the Rhine and Danube mutiny. Germanicus, the popular young general, campaigns across the Rhine and is recalled, and dies in Antioch in circumstances that look like poisoning, which Tacitus reports without asserting.

Then the slow closing in. Sejanus, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, becomes indispensable, concentrates the guard in one camp, destroys Germanicus’ family by informers and trials, and is himself destroyed in a single day when Tiberius’ letter is read in the senate. Tiberius withdraws to Capri and rules by correspondence, and the treason trials multiply. Tacitus’s Tiberius is not a monster from the start: he is an able, secretive, deeply resentful man who is progressively freed by circumstance from any need to pretend.

The Claudian books give us the emperor’s wives, Messalina’s public bigamous wedding while Claudius is at Ostia, and Agrippina, who marries her uncle, secures the succession for her son and is murdered by him.

The Neronian books contain the set pieces everybody remembers: the botched attempt to drown Agrippina in a collapsing boat and her ordering the assassin to strike her womb; the fire of 64 and the persecution of the Christians, which is the earliest substantial pagan account of them; the Pisonian conspiracy and the forced suicides that followed, including Seneca opening his veins in a bath, and Petronius arranging his death as a dinner party.

How to read it

Read Books I to VI in full if you read nothing else. The Tiberius narrative is Tacitus at full strength and is the portrait everything later in the genre descends from.

Then take the famous chapters: Book XIV on the murder of Agrippina, and Book XV on the fire, the Christians and the Pisonian conspiracy. Most courses assign approximately that.

Read with a list of consuls or a timeline to hand. Tacitus organises annalistically, year by year, which means a plot can be interrupted for a chapter on prodigies in Gaul and picked up two years later.

Watch what he does not say. He reports rumour as rumour, gives alternative versions, and lets the worse one sit last. When he says that some say Tiberius did this, and others that, the arrangement is the argument. Reading him honestly means noticing how often you have been led to a verdict he never delivered.

On translations: Grant is fluent and long assigned and smooths the Latin considerably, so you lose the strangeness. Woodman is close to the original and keeps the difficulty, which is the point if you want to see why Tacitus is admired as a stylist. Yardley sits between them and has the best notes.

The common misreading is to treat him as a straightforward source for what happened. He is a hostile witness writing sixty to a hundred years after the events, using earlier historians and senatorial records, with strong views about the men he describes. That is precisely why he is on the shelf, and it is why you should not take the poisonings on trust.

Questions it raises

• Tacitus claims to write without anger or partiality and clearly does neither. Does the claim function as a lie, a convention, or an invitation to watch him?
• If the forms of the republic survive while the substance is gone, is the pretence a mercy or the worst part of it?
• Tacitus served emperors he despised. What does the work suggest a decent person should do under a tyranny?
• The treason trials depend on informers who are ordinary men enriching themselves. Where does responsibility sit, with the emperor or with them?
• He is a hostile source for Tiberius and a near-contemporary one for Nero. How should a reader weigh him against the archaeology and the coins?
• His portrait of Tiberius shows a man corrupted progressively by opportunity. Is that a theory of power, or a novelist’s insight dressed as history?