Cornelius Tacitus
Annals 6 — the last years of Tiberius, and the credit crisis of 33
Ab excessu divi Augusti · Written about 115–120 CE, covering 32 to March 37 CE.
Rome, 33 CE. A forgotten law against usury is suddenly enforced, every lender calls in his loans at once, land is dumped on the market and prices collapse. Tiberius ends it with a hundred million sesterces of interest-free credit. The fullest account of a financial panic to survive from antiquity.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
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- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, The Annals of Tacitus (Macmillan, 1869). Two schoolmasters-turned-scholars who translated most of Tacitus together, and their governing decision was to unpack him. Where the Latin is a nine-word ablative absolute they give a full English clause with the logical connective supplied, so the argument is always visible and the menace is often gone; Tacitus' most famous effects depend on what he leaves out, and this translation puts a good deal of it back in. Their vocabulary for finance is mid-Victorian and worth watching — 'usury' for faenus, 'capital', 'creditor', 'the public exchequer' for aerarium and 'the imperial treasury' for fiscus, a distinction they make sharply and consistently even where the Latin is vaguer than they are. They also write Cæsar, Capreæ and Sejanus with the ligatures of their period.