The Neronian Annals

I'm Chris Whitton,

I teach Classics at the University of Cambridge,

and this is the first of a course of lectures on Nero's murder of.

Agrippina in Annals 14.

In this first segment,

I want to introduce, very briefly, Tacitus and the Annals, and especially,

think a little bit about how the books – there are three and a half books about Nero –

think about how they are arranged, and what that tells us about how Tacitus,

as a historian, interprets and sees Nero's reign.

So Publius Cornelius

Tacitus was born in the first years of Nero's reign, actually,

so he was a small child at the time of the events that were going to be discussing.

He rose from relatively – okay,

he was elite, but he came from not from the most noble part of the elite –

he rose from that to become consul in 97

and later on became governor of Asia, which is to say he did very well,

he had a good senatorial career,

but he's no sign he was ever one of the absolute intimates of any of the emperors.

He wrote

The Annals probably around in the 120s, maybe into the 130s AD,

So under the emperors –

well, possibly started under the Emperor Trajan, if he

started the 110s, and then the Emperor Hadrian.

The Annals is his last and the greatest of his works –

here it is, or here is what survives. About half of it is lost,

we have quite big chunks missing,

but what we can see is that it was a work probably in 18 books,

and it covered four emperors:

–

started with Tiberius in 14, and then Caligula and Claudius, and then finally Nero.

We have enough of it to see that it was almost certainly

written in what are known as hexads, groups of six books.

So there are six books for Tiberius, and we know that because we have the start and the end.

Then there was six books for Caligula and Claudius.

We've lost Caligula and half of Claudius,

But we do have the death of Claudius at the end of Book 12 so we can see that.

And then, although the Annals breaks off in the middle of Book 16,

it's very fair assumption that Books 13 to a putative Book 18

covered Nero to make a tidy set of three times six.

Think of how the Aeneid is two times six or Homer is four times six.

These are units to conjure with in ancient literature, so it's very plausible.

I talked a bit more about that in my first lecture on the Annals 12 course,

so I won't go into any more detail on that side of it,

but I do now want to introduce the Neronian books a bit more specifically.

How does Tacitus divide up Nero's reign, and why?

Now this takes us to an important point about annalistic writing.

On the face of it, it looks kind of objective.

You just run through year by year, a series of events,

in Rome and abroad.

But you only have to think for a

minute to realise that it's very subjective business,

actually, to decide what to include

and how much space to give any particular item, how far to emphasise it,

and indeed, what order to put them in, because Tacitus,

although he goes year by year, he's flexible about how he arranges the events

within a year.

He might group together a set of things

that suit him for a particular panel or purpose.

Now one particular way that we can see Tacitus – we could call it subjectivity,

we also call it interpretation –

This is how he's thinking about Nero's reign is

how he divides up the books that we have.

And what we can see is that he's identified

a series of turning points in Nero's reign.

This is a characteristic thing to do in ancient writing,

to look for the moment where a principate or any other historical period changes.

We all do it actually.

So, Book 13, the first book, opens naturally enough with his accession,

his coming to power,

in October 54, and Book 12, which he may have had a look at,

tells the run-up to that, the way Agrippina got

him adopted as Claudius' son and then poisoned Claudius.

The first major turning point,

it's clear, as Tacitus sees it, is the murder

of Agrippina – that's the subject of this course –

in Spring 59. So Tacitus puts that at the start of Book 14.

Book 13, therefore, fills in everything from the accession to the end of 58 AD,

So the first four and a bit years of Nero's reign,

that is the period when Agrippina is still alive, and what it charts,

and we'll look at this in a bit

more detail, is Nero's relatively good start,

but also the start of a decline of an emperor who is going to turn into a tyrant.

Book 14 starts,

as I say, with the death of Agrippina and is dominated by it

in the measure that it occupies nearly a quarter of the book.

And it tells this very famous story of how Nero decides to kill his mother.

He lures her to a dinner party on the Bay of Naples

and tries to have her drown

when a boat collapses.

He sends her back to her villa on a boat,

that's a typical way to travel in the Bay of Naples.

It fails. Agrippina escapes. She swims back to her villa,

so Nero sends a death squad – some marines led by one of his freedmen –

and they simply murder her.

And then the aftermath is Nero's fear and psychological torment,

I guess, after his matricide, and then his ... the way in

which he overcomes that with the help of the people around him,

and the way that ultimately the Senate and the people of Rome

will congratulate him as if this has been a great triumph.

So that dominates the start of Book 14,

as I say. It takes over most of the narrative of AD 59 too.

Now there's another major turning point. I said Agrippina was the first one.

The next one, as Tacitus evidently sees it, is the year 62,

and this time it's not a single event, it's a series of events.

First of all, the death of Burrus, the praetorian prefect,

the captain of the guard at Rome.

Second, and Tacitus connects the two: the fall from grace of Seneca,

Nero's tutor and other primary adviser. Burrus and Seneca

are the two kind of 'good guys' of Nero's early reign.

And with that, another change of personnel,

Burrus is replaced by two captains of the guard, one of whom Tigellinus, is a baddie,

and he becomes a major bad influence on Nero.

So does his lover, Poppaea.

She was involved in the death of Agrippina, and now at the end,

now in 62, she actually gets to marry Nero by having

him divorce and then even kill his existing wife,

Octavia.

So we have a series of changes of personnel, some deaths,

one fall from grace, and some new people coming to prominence,

And this together fills the end of Book 14,

and Tacitus is explicit that this is a time when public ills were getting worse.

He sees this as a pivot in Nero's reign.

So that means Book 14 is very neatly arranged.

First of all, it has a double frame of two cardinal moments.

You've got 59, death of Agrippina, at the start. 62,

all these series of events at the end.

Second, it creates a very neat symmetry. At the start of the book, Nero kills his mum.

At the end of the book he kills his wife – also his sister,

incidentally – and I'll come back to this in the last section of the course.

And then there's also kind of in the background, and very below the surface,

There's what you might call a Poppaea plot. She barely features in Book 14,

but she has a prominent role right at the start

and a prominent role in the death of Octavia.

So one way you can read Book 14 is not just that Nero is

freeing himself from the influence of people

like his mother and Burrus and Seneca,

but that he's coming into the grasp of a new and malevolent person,

Poppaea. And I'll have some more to say about that when we come to her.

So that's two turning points.

The third big turning point for Tacitus is the Pisonian conspiracy.

This happened in Spring 65, a major attempt to kill Nero,

replace him with another emperor called Piso.

It failed,

and there's a huge purge that follows. People who are and may or

may not have been involved with it get executed or, most commonly,

forced to commit suicide, which is a standard form of execution

For noble Romans.

People who get caught up in that include Seneca

and the author Petronius, amongst others.

Tacitus makes that massively dominate Book 15 – not at the start, but at the end –

so Book 15 picks up after

the death of Octavia in 62

and it runs to 65. It also features another very famous event, the Fire of Rome.

So what we have is the first, we've got the first half of the hexad, the first three books,

taking us from Nero's accession to the Pisonian conspiracy, incidentally

covering a large proportion of his reign – that's

eight years out of thirteen and three quarters.

So what happens after that is less clear. We have the first half of Book 16 –

tt includes the death of Poppaea,

a whole series of more deaths.

There's a clear sort of mood of tyranny developing,

continuing to develop and bedding in,

but we don't have the rest of that book, we don't have Books 17 or 18.

We can know that they would have included Nero's great artistic tour of Greece

and the whole the whole complex series of revolts that eventually lead

to Nero being declared a public enemy and committing suicide in June 68

and Tacitus must have really slowed down for those books.

He's only got three years to cover in two and a half books,

but that's perfectly plausible.

– no, two years to cover in the last two books – that that's quite plausible. There are

other parts of his works, the start of his Histories, where he goes very,

very slowly.

So there's a quick overview of the Neronian Annals,

of the major turning points in Nero's principate

as Tacitus sees them, and as I said at the start

perhaps the most important take home from this –

apart from a bit of historical background –

is the point about annalistic selectivity.

It was up to Tacitus how to arrange that,

how to divide the books,

how much space to give two different events within them, and indeed

what to miss out altogether,

and you can see, I think, already,

how these staging points make for artistic tidiness.

You get a certain unity to individual books, and you get a nice,

clear progression to the drama.

But they also are historically important.

They are forms of historical analysis, and indeed,

they have defined debate about Nero's reign ever since.