The Annals
The Annals of Imperial Rome
Tacitus on the emperors from Tiberius to Nero, written by a senator who watched autocracy corrode the people closest to it.
Tacitus wrote the Annals a generation after the events, as a senator who had watched the principate work on the men inside it. The surviving books run from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, and the subject is less the emperors’ crimes than what absolute power does to everyone around it: the flattery, the informers, the senate voting its own humiliation. The Latin is famously compressed, and the judgements are merciless.
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Mary Beard
What he does is seduce you with an extraordinary tale, but there is also a cynical, hard-hitting analysis of corruption. Reading Tacitus in Latin is like reading James Joyce. It’s language which is really at the margins of comprehensibility as well as being very exciting. But, actually, he wants to talk about the corruption of autocracy. It’s about one-man rule going bad.
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