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

In his history of Rome and Roman historiography, Tacitus posits two
key watersheds: 31 BC and AD 96. This generates a tripartite scheme. In
republican times, the political set-up produced and enabled outstanding
authors. By contrast, the period from Actium until the death of Domitian,
dominated as it was by the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, was
not conducive to literary talents: contemporary accounts are marred by
various flaws to do with the wider political milieu. With the rise to power
of a new type of princeps committed to republican norms in the wake of
Domitian, could historiography, too, regain its former heights and produce
an account of the previous epoch that avoids the inevitable deficiencies of
contemporary voices? Without being too explicit about it, Tacitus seems to
be answering this question in the affirmative: only now, under Trajan, so he
seems to be saying, has the time come for writing the history of the earlier
emperors, thereby advertising the job he is minded to take on himself.
Tacitus approaches his task in inverse chronological order: in the Histories,
he revisits the year of the four emperors and the rise and fall of the Flavian
dynasty (AD 69 –96); in the subsequent Annals, he covers the period from
the death of the first to the death of the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors,
that is, Augustus to Nero.
The Annals
As in the Histories, Tacitus uses the opening sentence of the Annals for a
grand sweep through Roman history from the very beginning down to
imperial times (Annals 1.1):
Urbem Romam a principio reges habuere; libertatem et consulatum L.
Brutus instituit. dictaturae ad tempus sumebantur; neque decemviralis
potestas ultra biennium, neque tribunorum militum consulare ius diu valuit.
non Cinnae, non Sullae longa dominatio; et Pompei Crassique potentia cito
in Caesarem, Lepidi atque Antonii arma in Augustum cessere, qui cuncta
discordiis civilibus fessa nomine principis sub imperium accepit. sed
veteris populi Romani prospera vel adversa claris scriptoribus memorata
sunt; temporibusque Augusti dicendis non defuere decora ingenia, donec
gliscente adulatione deterrerentur. Tiberii Gaique et Claudii ac Neronis res
florentibus ipsis ob metum falsae, postquam occiderant, recentibus odiis
compositae sunt. inde consilium mihi pauca de Augusto et extrema tradere,
mox Tiberii principatum et cetera, sine ira et studio, quorum causas procul
habeo.
[Rome at the outset was a city state under the government of kings: liberty and
the consulate were institutions of Lucius Brutus. Dictatorships were always