Annals (Tacitus)

[2][3] The name of the current manuscript seems to be "Books of History from the Death of the Divine Augustus" (Ab Excessu divi Augusti Historiarum Libri).

He says again that Augustus gave and warranted peace to the state after years of civil war, but on the other hand he shows us the dark side of life under the Caesars.

During Nero's reign there had been a widespread diffusion of literary works in favor of this suicidal exitus illustrium virorum ("end of the illustrious men").

[8] In 1878, John Wilson Ross and, in 1890, Polydore Hochart suggested that the whole of the Annals had been forged by the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459).

[11] Voorst, however, does not address any of Ross' objections regarding numerous purported historical inaccuracies in the Annals, but only faults Hochart on a few points in a footnote.

[12][13][14] Regardless of whether the Monte Cassino manuscripts were moved to Florence by Boccaccio or da Strada, Boccaccio made use of the Annals when he wrote Commento di Dante c. 1374 (before the birth of Poggio Bracciolini), giving an account of Seneca's death directly based on the Tacitean account in Annals book 15.

[15][16] Francis Newton states that it is likely that Annals 11–16 were in Monte Cassino during the first half of the rule of Abbot Desiderius (1058–1087) who later became Pope Victor III.

[17] Annals 1–6 were then independently discovered at Corvey Abbey in Germany in 1508 by Giovanni Angelo Arcimboldi, afterwards Archbishop of Milan, and were first published in Rome in 1515 by Beroaldus, by order of Pope Leo X, who afterwards deposited the manuscript in the Medicean Library in Florence.

[6] In Donna Leon's third Commissario Brunetti novel Dressed for Death (1994), the protagonist reads Tacitus' Annals in his spare time in the evenings, and various references to that material are made throughout the novel.

In Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Garden of Forking Paths, when Yu Tsun, the main character, takes the train to carry out his final mission in the fictitious town of Ashgrove, among the few persons he encounters on the train is a young man fervently reading Tacitus’ Annals.