The Annals of Tacitus: Book 11

A newly established Latin text and detailed commentary on a wide variety of philological and historical issues arising from the narrative.

Tacitus (Author), S. J. V. Malloch (Edited by)

9781108820165, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 May 2020

560 pages, 1 table
21.5 x 14 x 3.5 cm, 0.7 kg

'… extremely useful and enlightening, with excellent introductions to the different episodes or scenes of book 11 … It deals with all matters that will help the reader reach a better understanding of the Tacitean text.' Antonio Ramírez de Verger, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Book 11, the first of the later books of the Annals to survive, narrates two years in the reign of Claudius, AD 47–8. While Claudius is busy with the duties of his censorship, his wife Messalina is having a very public love affair with the young aristocrat Silius that eventually ruins her. In a book that also treats German, eastern, and other Roman internal affairs, a third of the surviving narrative is devoted to the destruction of Messalina. Here we encounter the classic portrayal of a Claudius ignorant and manipulated by those around him in an extended narrative that shows Tacitus at his dramatic and cynical best. This edition of Book 11, the first scholarly one in English in over a hundred years, contains a full introduction, a newly-edited Latin text with apparatus, and a comprehensive commentary that illuminates historical, historiographical, textual, linguistic, and literary issues that arise from the narrative.

Introduction
Text
Commentary.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary studies: general [DSB]