Annals

What It Is

A history of the Roman emperors from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the end of Nero, written around AD 110 to 120 by a senator who had held the consulship, governed a province, and spent his early career surviving Domitian. Tacitus knew exactly how the system he was describing felt from the inside, because he had prospered in it.

The text is damaged. Whole books are lost: the reign of Caligula is gone entirely, along with the beginning of Claudius and the end of Nero. What survives is roughly two thirds of the original, and it stops mid-sentence.

The Latin is the hardest and best in the language. Tacitus writes in short, unbalanced, asymmetrical sentences engineered so that the reader completes the accusation he has not quite made. He rarely states that a man is guilty. He reports what was said, notes who benefited, and moves on. The insinuation is the style, and the style is the argument.

Why It Matters

This is the anatomy of how a free state keeps its forms after losing its substance. The senate still meets in Tacitus. Offices are still filled, votes still taken, honours still voted. Everyone knows what it is worth. His subject is the corrosion that follows: the courtier's calculation, the informer's trade, the applause that must be loud enough and no louder.

He is the first writer to grasp that the worst thing about tyranny is not what it does to the tyrant but what it does to everyone who has to flatter him. Gibbon wrote in his shadow. The American founders quoted him against George III. Every twentieth-century writer who set out to describe life under a dictatorship discovered Tacitus had been there first.

He is also, incidentally, the earliest non-Christian writer to mention Christ, in a passage of two sentences in Book 15 that has been fought over for four hundred years.

Before You Read

Around four hundred pages, and hard: fifteen hours if you are honest with it. This is not a book to hurry.

He assumes you know the imperial family. Get a genealogical table, keep it open, and accept that the Julio-Claudians recycled about six names between forty people. Every good edition provides one.

The mindset that works: read him for the sentences, not for the events. Tacitus is a prosecutor building a case, and you are the jury. If you read him for narrative you will find him choppy, digressive and slow. If you read him as an argument about power, conducted at the level of the individual clause, he is the most exciting historian who ever lived.

Which Translation to Read

• Michael Grant, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Penguin Classics, 1956, revised) — recommended. Grant is the reason Tacitus has a general readership in English. He writes vigorous, momentum-driven prose, breaks the book into navigable sections, and supplies maps, family trees and a glossary. For a first reader who wants to get through the Annals and be gripped, nothing else comes close. The cost, and it is real: Grant smooths. He imposes his own headings, blurs the ancient book divisions, and turns the compressed epigrams into ordinary English sentences. He gives you Tacitus's mind, not his voice. View on Amazon →
• A. J. Woodman (Hackett, 2004). The scholar's Tacitus. Woodman reproduces the word order, the unbalanced clauses and the deliberate strangeness, and annotates it all on the page. Read him and you finally hear what the Latin sounds like. The cost: it is hard, on purpose, and it is not the version to meet the book in.
• J. C. Yardley (Oxford World's Classics, 2008), with introduction and notes by Anthony Barrett. The best balance available: accurate, readable, and the historical annotation is superb. The sensible middle path. The cost: it neither drives like Grant nor bites like Woodman.

Take Grant to read it, Yardley if you want accuracy without pain, Woodman when you want to know what you have been missing. Cynthia Damon's newer Penguin (2012) is elegant and closer to the Latin than Grant, and is the one to compare him against.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read slowly and read aloud when a sentence stops you. Tacitus writes to be recited; the malice does not come through at speed.

Watch the verbs and watch what he withholds. He will give you two explanations for an act, dismiss neither, and let the uglier one stand. Ask, every few pages, whether he has actually proved anything. Often he has not. He is nearly always convincing anyway, and noticing the gap between those two facts is the real education this book offers.

Read the introduction afterwards. Almost all of them summarise the reigns, and the Annals works best on a reader who is discovering it as Tacitus intended, one insinuation at a time.