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

took a detour with the character portrayal of Vatinius and the Silanus affair.
Nero returned to the idea of touring Greece in AD 66, but the part of the
Annals that would have covered the tour is unfortunately lost. Tacitus here
employs very vague temporal markers (what does non multo post mean,
precisely?), arguably to obfuscate that he is playing fast and loose with
facts and chronology – certainly to pretend to bracket off the (displaced)
rubbing out of Silanus as if merely incidental to the chief narrative thread,
storming the world of song. (Before ‘revisiting’ Beneventum.)
fuere = fuerunt. If the assumption is correct that
Tacitus made up Nero’s desire to tour Greece in AD 64 and then abandoning
the plan, it hardly surprises that his reasons for not going remain obscure.
At the same time, the phrase adds an air of intrigue to Nero’s alleged change
of heart. Did he hear about a conspiracy? Was the affair of Torquatus more
serious? Was he more alarmed by events in Neapolis than he made out?
The silence of this parenthesis adds drama, certainly. And by contrast it
underlines that the reasons for getting rid of Silanus were unmistakeable,
however nonchalantly Nero assured us otherwise.
Usually, as here, Rome.
provincias Orientis, maxime Aegyptum, secretis imaginationibus
Tacitus here gives a standard idiom a lurid twist: agitare aliquid/
de aliqua re in the sense of ‘to drive at a thing in the mind, to consider,
meditate upon’ often takes an ablative of place (with or without in),
such as in corde, in mente, or animo. Here we get the highly suggestive
secretis imaginationibus (‘in his private delusions’, ‘in his secret fancies’).
The rare, ponderous, noun imaginatio, to be sure, fits the object of
Nero’s obsession – in Rome’s cultural imagination the Eastern part of
the Mediterranean was associated with fables and fantasies as well as
an elaborate culture of performance, from drama to music. But we may
wonder how Tacitus could have had evidence of the day-dreams of the
emperor. As with the abandoned trip to Greece, the historiographer
here adopts a stance of impossible omniscience. The trip to the Near
East, though, acquired a different degree of reality: as the following
sentences make clear, Nero ‘staged’, in the most public fashion, his
decision both to go – and not to go.