Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

Rufus and refocus attention from republican office to the doings of the
imperial family.
Nero was Poppaea Sabina’s third husband, and she his second
wife – after Octavia. She enters the Annals at 13.45 (in his account of the year
AD 58) as the wife of the knight Rufrius Crispinus. The paragraph opens
programmatically with the sentence non minus insignis eo anno impudicitia
magnorum rei publicae malorum initium fecit (‘a no less striking instance of
immorality proved in the year the beginning of grave public calamities’)
and continues as follows:
There was in the capital a certain Poppaea Sabina, daughter of Titus Ollius,
though she had taken the name of her maternal grandfather, Poppaeus
Sabinus, of distinguished memory, who, with the honours of his consulate
and triumphal insignia, outshone her father: for Ollius had fallen a victim
to his friendship with Sejanus before holding the major offices. She was a
woman possessed of all advantages but good character (huic mulieri cuncta
alia fuere praeter honestum animum). For her mother, after eclipsing the
beauties of her day, had endowed her alike with her fame and her looks:
her wealth was adequate for her standing by birth. Her conversation was
engaging, her wit not without point (sermo comis nec absurdum ingenium); she
paraded modesty, and practised wantonness (modestiam praeferre et lascivia
uti). In public she rarely appeared, and then with her face half-veiled, so
as not quite to satiate the beholder, – or, possibly, because that look suited
her. She was never sparing of her reputation, and drew no distinctions
between husbands and adulterers (famae numquam pepercit, maritos et
adulteros non distinguens): vulnerable neither to her own nor to alien passion,
where material advantage offered, that’s where she transferred her desires
(neque adfectui suo aut alieno obnoxia, unde utilitas ostenderetur, illuc libidinem
transferebat). Thus whilst living in the wedded state with Rufrius Crispinus,
a Roman knight by whom she had had a son, she was seduced by Otho
[sc. the future emperor], with his youth, his voluptousness, and his reputed
position as the most favoured of Nero’s friends: nor was it long before
adultery was mated to matrimony (nec mora quin adulterio matrimonium
iungeretur).
Otho praised the beauty and charms of his wife in the presence of Nero –
either, so Tacitus submits in the following paragraph (13.46), because he
was so smitten with love that he could not help himself (amore incautus)
or because he deliberately wished to inflame the emperor’s desire with a
view to a threesome that would have reinforced his own influence at court
by the additional bond of joint ownership in one woman (si eadem femina
poterentur [sc. he and Nero], id quoque vinculum potentiam ei adiceret). The plan