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

The author of the Octavia (a so-called fabula praetexta or ‘historical drama’
that features Nero’s unfortunate first wife as protagonist) also blames
Nero, but connects the fire with his outrageous treatment of Octavia,
which happened two years earlier in AD 62 (831–33, Nero speaking):
mox tecta flammis concidant urbis meis,
ignes ruinae noxium populum premant
turpisque egestas, saeva cum luctu fames.
[Next the city’s buildings must fall to flames set by me. Fire, ruined homes,
sordid poverty, cruel starvation along with grief must crush this criminal
populace.]
In the light of a tradition in which Nero is the culprit plain and simple,
Tacitus’ strategy is rather more subtle. He refrains from fingering Nero
outright, relying instead on insinuation and a bag of further rhetorical
tricks to associate the emperor with rendering his people, already adrift
in a moral morass, ‘Romeless’ through the physical destruction of the
capital. The most conspicuous ploy concerns his manipulation of the
so-called urbs-capta topos, to which our last two sections are dedicated.
(c) Tacitus’ creative engagement with the urbs-capta motif
The urbs-capta topos refers to the rhetorical representation of a city
captured and destroyed by enemy forces. 151 The Rhetorica ad Herennium,
an anonymous handbook on rhetoric from the first century BC, uses the
topos as one of his examples to illustrate ‘vivid description’ (4.39.51): 152
Nam neminem vestrum fugit, Quirites, urbe capta quae miseriae consequi
soleant: arma qui contra tulerunt statim crudelissime trucidantur; ceteri
qui possunt per aetatem et vires laborem ferre rapiuntur in servitutem, qui
non possunt vita privantur; uno denique atque eodem tempore domus
hostili flagrat incendio, et quos natura aut voluntas necessitudine et
benivolentia coniunxit distrahuntur; liberi partim e gremiis diripiuntur
parentum, partim in sinu iugulantur, partim ante pedes constuprantur.
Nemo, iudices, est qui possit satis rem consequi verbis nec efferre oratione
magnitudinem calamitatis.
151 See the treatments by Paul (1982), who traces the literary topos and its thematic range
back to Homer’s Iliad and explores its subsequent career in ‘tragic’ historiography, and
Ziolkowski (1993), who looks into the specifically Roman spin on it.
152 We cite the text and translation by H. Caplan in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
Mass., 1954).