Tacitus, Annales VI: Beginning and End *

Our sole witness for the text of Annales I–VI, the so-called Mediceus, ¹ duly registers the ends of books 1 through 4, but of no book thereafter. The question of where to locate the beginning of book 6 has not been discussed at any length since 1848, and that we have the end of book 6 at our 6.51 has not, to my knowledge, ever been disputed. The answer we posit to both questions has, obviously, profound implications for modern attempts to interpret the structure of the Annales. This note urges on the former issue a return to the division after 5.11 first established by Lipsius, and on the latter proposes the radical solution that we do not possess the end of book 6.

Though Emilio Ferretti (1541, ad loc.) was the first to perceive the difficulty in the text of books 5 and 6 as preserved by M, Lipsius took the necessary step of establishing a break between the books, at 5.11: his book 6 begins at the start of A.D. 32. Though he perceived that a two-year gap separates 5.5 and 5.6, he settled on 6.1 not for any solid reason, but on purely arbitrary grounds (1585, 265). Lipsius did, however, attempt to anticipate one counterattack: some will argue that his division leaves book 5 too short, since it will contain the events of only three years, 29–31 A.D. (ibid.). In 1848 Friedrich Haase attacked the position taken by Lipsius on several fronts: first, Lipsius’ division leaves book 6 disproportionately short, and nothing can be missing from the end of this book because it cannot be doubted that Tacitus began book 7 with the accession of Gaius. Second, even if it were not self-evident that the death of the emperor was more important than the end of a year, this would follow naturally upon the observation that Tacitus closes book 12 in October, after the death of Claudius, although in order to complete that year he would only have had to move the first ten chapters of book 13. Third, there is no way that the scribe could have overlooked or forgotten a colophon between 5.11 and 6.1 because M records them in such large letters. Finally, Tacitus would have regarded the death of Seianus, the aftermath of which is covered in 5.6–11, as eminently suitable for the end of a book, as he closed book 9 with the death of Messalina, or book 15 with the suppression of the Pisonian conspiracy. Haase also anticipated, and dismissed, the charge that, on his reconstruction, book 5 will be too short, since it will cover even less than the three years assumed by Lipsius (1848, 152–53).

Subsequent scholars, to the extent that any have commented on this issue, have followed Haase as resolutely as earlier editors followed Lipsius. ² Variations on Haase’s argument have been offered by Nipperdey 1879, who suggested that the downfall of Seianus was so dramatic that readers needed a respite in the form of a book-break before resuming with the prosecution of his adherents (ad 5.5); and by Ronald Martin, who argued that “in spite of the loss of most of Book 5 and (probably) the beginning of Book 6 it seems clear that, as Germanicus dies towards the end of Book 2, with the aftermath of his death flowing over into the opening chapters of Book 3, so Seianus’ death occurred at or near the end of Book 5, while the aftermath of his death flows over into the early chapters of Book 6” (1991, 1518 n. 55).

We can first dispose of any concerns about the length of either book. There were relatively few constraints upon the size of a papyrus roll: one could be as long or short as desired. A roll’s apparent length would also depend in large measure on the hand in which it was written, and how tightly it was rolled. For obvious reasons, long books were far more unwieldy than short ones, not least because it...