Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries

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.