Books & Classics
The Annals as transmitted
Tacitus set out to write the history of the Roman empire under the successors of Augustus, and what survives of the Annals is Books I–VI and XI–XVI — a great history with its middle and end torn out by time. The new annotated edition prints the surviving books as they have come down to us, names the lost books openly, and adds nothing of its own to fill the gaps. Read this way, the book is two stories at once: the empire Tacitus described, and the fragile road — copyists, libraries, chance — by which any ancient text reaches a reader at all.