Tacitus opens the Annals with a succinct sketch of the constitutional history of Rome from the kings to Augustus (1.1.1). The common interpretation holds that Tacitus adopts a cyclical view of this history which identifies the supremacy of Augustus with kingship, and chooses his vocabulary of power primarily with stylistic variation in mind. The terms employed, princeps and imperium, are also held to announce a major interpretative preoccupation of the Annals, the gap between the ‘appearance’ and the ‘reality’ of power (...) under the principate. This essay will demonstrate that these interpretations of the structure and language of the preface are misleading. Tacitus offers a sequential view of Roman constitutional history that casts Augustus as a pivot between the tradition stretching back to the foundation of the city and a new phase which he identifies in its own terms, not as a reversion to kingship. The introduction of the motif of ‘appearance v. reality’ comes not with the language of princeps and imperium, but at 1.2.1. An appendix analyses the use of the term principatus in Velleius Paterculus and Tacitus. (shrink)

This essay offers three arguments concerning the ancient tradition about the mons Caelius. (1) Tacitus’ digression on the name of the mons Caelius at Annals 4.65 provides a useful framework for interpreting the complexity of the tradition: Caeles Vibenna should be regarded as a constant feature, his chronological context as an unstable feature that was recognised as such. (2) Claudius’ report of Etruscan auctores on the naming of the mons Caelius in his speech of A. D. 48 about the Gauls, (...) correctly emended, offers a unique etymology that cannot be reconciled with Roman accounts. (3) The presence of appellitare in Tacitus’ digression and Claudius' speech is normally assumed to prove Tacitus’ debt to Claudius, but this assumption cannot be sustained in the face of their fundamentally irreconcilable treatments of Caeles Vibenna. Tacitus used appellitare independently of Claudius, who was not a source of Ann. 4.65. (shrink)