Guide to the classics: Tacitus‘ Annals and its enduring portrait of monarchical power

At the BookShelf

The death of popular prince Germanicus painted by Nicolas Poussin in 1627.
Senex Magister/flickr

Caillan Davenport, Macquarie University

Sometime in the 9th century AD, a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Fulda in modern Germany copied out an extensive Latin history into Carolingian minuscule, a script promoted by the emperor Charlemagne to aid in the reading and comprehension of great works of literature. It is to this monk that we owe the preservation of the first part of what is arguably the greatest history of imperial Rome, the Annals of P. Cornelius Tacitus.

The Annals tells the story of the Roman empire under the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which ruled Rome from 27 BC to AD 68. It begins with the death of the first emperor Augustus (27 BC-AD 14), and then covers in detail the reigns of his successors, Tiberius (AD 14-37), Caligula (AD 37-41), Claudius (AD 41-54), and

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