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

to undergo the painful process of learning to turn his back on Troy (and the
past) and to pursue Rome (and the future). He does not fully grasp this until
about midway through the poem. Likewise, in the final meeting between
Jupiter and Juno towards the end of Aeneid 12 up in cloud-cuckoo-land,
Juno only agrees to desist from further opposing destiny once Jupiter has
promised her that the Roman people will bear hardly any trace of Trojan
cultural identity (such as speech or dress). 160 All of this is unsurprising: in
a story that turns world-historical losers (the Trojans) into world-historical
winners (the Romans), difference and differentiation from the catastrophic
origins are just as important as legitimizing continuities.
Against this background, what happens in Tacitus’ account of the fire
of Rome acquires a fascinating intertextual and ideological complexion. As
other sources, Tacitus records (though without committing himself to the
truth of the rumour) that Nero, when the spirit moved him to comment
on the conflagration in verse, allegedly assimilated the fire of Rome
to the fall of Troy (15.39): ... pervaserat rumor ipso tempore flagrantis urbis
inisse eum domesticam scaenam et cecinisse Troianum excidium, praesentia mala
vetustis cladibus adsimulantem (‘the rumour had spread that, at the very
moment when Rome was aflame, he had mounted his private stage, and,
assimilating the ills of the present to the calamities of the past, had sung the
Destruction of Troy’). If he did, Nero would have activated a tragic outlook
on Rome’s prospects of eternity that contrasts sharply with the notion
of an imperium sine fine. This outlook recalls, rather, Scipio Aemilianus
Minor. Greek sources report the Roman general to have been stirred into a
moment of tragic reflexivity after his sack of Carthage in 146 BC, when he
apparently recited two verses from the Iliad, in which Hector recognizes
the inevitability of the fall of Troy (6.448–49):
[The day shall come when sacred Ilios will perish and Priam and the people
of Priam with goodly spear of ash.]
Scipio here both thinks backwards in time (to Troy) as well as forward (to
Rome), in anticipating the same future for Rome that Troy (and Carthage)
have already suffered: destruction. 161 In so doing, he clearly identifies Troy
and Rome, at least from the point of view of their ultimate destiny.
160 Virgil, Aeneid 12.791-842.
161 See O’Gorman (2000) 168–71 for possible affinities between Scipio and Nero (via Livy).