The overall message of Tacitus, in the Annals, appears to be the same as the one articulated by Lord Acton some nineteen centuries later—that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Tacitus sees the dissolution of the Roman Republic as a tragedy, partly because he regards the Republican system as having been ideal for Rome, but also because human weakness and folly prevent any single leader from wielding power properly—especially given the immorality of most of the Julio-Claudian family which took over the Roman government beginning with Augustus in 27 BCE. Tacitus's purpose in writing the Annals is thus to give a clear presentation of the facts, without the kind of reliance on rumor and gossip that marks, say, Suetonius's account of the same period, but also to attempt explaining why things went so wrong during the hundred years or so after the assassination of Julius Caesar and the Civil War that followed it.
Though Augustus himself was a competent leader and basically a good man (by the standards of the time), he was manipulated by his wife Livia, who from the start sought every means to insure that her son from her first marriage, Tiberius, would become emperor after Augustus's death. With regard to the reign of Augustus, Tacitus is careful not to pronounce any absolute judgment, but prefers to say things to the effect that "some held this view," and "some believed" otherwise. He deals with Augustus relatively briefly, and then launches into a detailed analysis of Tiberius's power hunger and corruption. In the latter part of the Annals, dealing with Nero, the reader gets a palpable sense of the shock and indignation of the author over the fact that such a corrupt and perverted individual was in charge. That Tacitus's purpose is nevertheless to be as objective as possible is shown especially in the section dealing with the catastrophic fire that engulfed Rome in 64 CE. Rumors had begun to circulate almost immediately (and persist into our time nearly 2,000 years later) that Nero himself had given orders to start the fire. Suetonius, by contrast with Tacitus, reports this more or less as a fact. Tacitus himself carefully states that it will never be known if the fire was the consequence of a criminal act on the part of the Emperor, while at the same time giving incidental evidence that this might have been the case—specifically, for instance, that soldiers were seen preventing people from doing anything to stop the progress of the fire. This is typical of Tacitus's attempt, despite the fact that his overall purpose in writing the Annals is to show the corruption of absolute power, to report the facts as he knows them and allow the reader to judge what a disaster most of the Julio-Claudian leaders were for Rome.
The main motivation behind Tacitus' writing of the Annals was his horror and disgust at the decadence of the Roman empire. Tacitus himself was not only a stern moralist but also a meticulous prose stylist, who, like George Orwell centuries later, saw the decline of culture and language as connected to the decline of civic morality. His rejection of luxuriant Asianist excesses of literary style, and his own concise, unadorned, and even elliptical prose were part of a general disgust with the decadence of Rome under some of its worst emperors.
The Annales documents in merciless detail the corruption and decadence of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, connecting their lust for power with their equally unrestrained physical lusts for food and sex (often of a particularly depraved variety -- in the case of Tiberius, pedophilia was just the beginning of a very long list of forms of depravity).
Tacitus sees murder, torture, matricide, pedophilia, betrayal, rape, and other forms of decadence not only as personal excesses but as the natural outcome of despotism. In his portrait of the decline of the Roman Empire's moral nature, he is arguing that the Republic bred people of better moral stature than the empire and is arguing for moral and political reform.
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