Annals (Tacitus)

Tacitus’s history of the Roman empire from the death of Augustus in AD 14 through Nero, written around AD 115-120 by a senator who had held the consulship and watched the system from inside it. The subject is not conquest but the mechanics of one-man rule: how the senate went on meeting, the elections went on being held and the vocabulary of the republic went on being used while every decision that mattered moved into the emperor’s household. The portrait of Tiberius, and of the informers and treason trials, is the most sustained account in Latin of how institutions get hollowed out while their forms remain.

Parts of the text are lost, and Tacitus writes with an unconcealed view of the men he describes — a senator’s view, and an unfriendly one.

Context: At Lexile 1350 this is one of the list’s hardest entries. It is also on the reading list The Founders and the Classics reconstructs: the founders read Tacitus as the case study in how a republic’s institutions can survive in name after the power has left them.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Tacitus — the author, a consul writing about the office-holders’ own world.
• Rome — the empire in its first century.
• Institutions — the book’s real subject: forms outliving their function.
• The Twelve Caesars (Suetonius) — the same emperors as character studies, also on this list.
• The Early History of Rome — Livy on how the republic’s institutions were built, the other end of the arc.
• Germania (Tacitus) — the same author’s short work on the peoples beyond the Rhine, also on this list.
• History — political history at its most compressed.