A New Type of Civil War in Tacitus

Civil war is among the central themes of Tacitus’ historical work. It is explicit at the beginning of the work now called the Historiae; it is implicit at the opening of the Annales. This paper reads the opening of the Annales as being in dialogue with the Historiae after demonstrating that the circulation history of both works points to Tacitus’ having conceived Annales 1 as the opening act of a consolidated thirty-book history. Jerome and an author of the Historia Augusta each offer strong testimony that, by the mid-fourth century A.D. at the latest, Tacitus’ historical works were commonly understood as a single work, while evidence for their separation is scanty (Oliver). In so doing, it allows such studies on the Historiae as Ash (2010) and Keitel to be extended to the Annales.

A unitary reading of the Tacitean history draws attention to the parallelism across the Historiae and the Annales and offers possibilities of analysis missed in even the best structural analyses (e.g., Wille). In particular, it helps to explain several of the peculiarities of Tacitus’ accounts of A.D. 14 and 69. In the year 69, Tacitus exceeds Suetonius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio, in emphasizing Galba’s age, and he diverges from them in his deliberate evocation of the Republican past through Galba. In the year 14, he dwells at far greater length than Velleius Paterculus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio on the Pannonian and German mutinies, which are the first events narrated at length in the Annales and occupy 36 of its 81 chapters (1.16–51). Whereas scholars have perceptively analyzed these two peculiarities as allusions to various models, such (in the case of Galba) as Vergil’s Priam (Joseph) or (in the case of the German and Pannonian mutinies) Livy’s account of the mutiny at Sucro (Woodman), the unitary reading offers a more economical explanation in terms of what emerges as the cardinal concern of Tacitus’ history: civil war’s inevitability under both Republic and Principate (Ash 1999).

In this light, the year 14 can be read as providing a contrast with the Year of the Four Emperors, in which the incompetent Republicanism of Galba ends in disaster, while the deceptive Republicanism of Tiberius (Häussler) averts open civil war but culminates in what Tacitus describes as a “A scene unlike all the civil wars that have ever happened” (diversa omnium quae umquam accidere civilium armorum facies, Ann. 1.49), at the slaughter in the German camp. This new type of civil war is carried out by other means than the open carnage that punctuated the fifty-seven years from Sulla’s march on Rome to the Battle of Actium and that reemerged in A.D. 69. Civil war is thus a constant for Tacitus that explodes the Romance of the Republic and ties it together with the specious stability of the Principate.