The Reign of Tiberius: The First Six Annals of Tacitus

About this book

Tacitus's Annals open with the death of Augustus in AD 14, and these first six books follow the reign of his stepson Tiberius: the mutinies of the legions, the campaigns of the popular Germanicus across the Rhine and his mysterious death in Antioch, the treason trials in which senators destroyed each other, the rise of the ambitious prefect Sejanus and his fall, and the old emperor's retreat to the island of Capri. This volume adds Tacitus's description of the Germanic tribes and his life of his father-in-law Agricola, the governor of Britain, with its famous charge that the Romans make a desert and call it peace.

Context and significance

Tacitus wrote in the early second century AD, and his compressed, ironic style makes him the greatest historian of imperial Rome. This is the translation by Thomas Gordon, an eighteenth-century political writer, edited by Arthur Galton. His account of the following civil wars is The Histories.

About the author