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

34.2 ergo per compositos cantus grates dis atque ipsam recentis
Beneventum interim consedit, ubi gladiatorium munus a Vatinio
celebre edebatur.
compositos implies that Nero wrote the songs
himself.
One can
either supply agens with grates dis or take both grates and ipsam fortunam
as accusative objects of celebrans in what would be a zeugma. The zeugma
gives the sentence a slightly strained feel, helping to convey the oddity of
Nero’s actions. ipsam recentis casus (= mis-fortune) fortunam (= luck, good
fortune) celebrans amounts to a paradox.
grates: See above on 20.1.
The -que links celebrans and petiturus. Note the
variatio here, this time in terms of word order: the present participle
celebrans comes at the end of its phrase, whereas the future petiturus...
comes at the beginning. The juxtaposition of a present participle and
future participle is striking: Nero has hardly finished dealing with one
calamity before his mind is already set on the next outrage.
Tacitus uses the poetic phrase maris
Hadriae (lit. ‘of the Sea of Hadria’, i.e. the town of Adria, rather than plain
adjectival ‘of the Adriatic Sea’). traiectus is accusative plural. One wonders
what evidence Tacitus can have had for the claim that already in AD 64 Nero
had plans to go straight from his first public appearance on stage at Neapolis
on a tour through Greece – two years before he actually did. At 36.1, at any
rate, Tacitus reports that Nero had dropped the plan for unknown reasons
and returned from Beneventum to Rome: nec multo post omissa in praesens
Achaia (causae in incerto fuere) urbem revisit (see below). Now it is true that
Beneventum, though situated to the north of Neapolis, would be a good stop
on the way to Brundisium, especially if Nero wanted to honour Vatinius with
his presence at the games: it was situated at the Via Appia (see Map of Italy);
but for the same reasons, Nero might have gone there on his way back to
Rome. Given that a tour of Greece by the emperor was a logistical challenge
of the first order, it is rather unlikely that Nero opted for and against going