Customer Reviews

The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero (Oxford World's Classics)

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This is by far the best translation of the Annals for general readers. The Arthur Murphy translation (often called the Oxford Translation) is written in charming 18th century English in a style reminiscent of Gibbon, but its verbosity is not always an accurate representation of the original Latin. The Church and Brodribb is nearly literal, but Tacitus's run-on sentences and unorthodox Latin vocabulary choices don't render well into the translators' mannered, archaic Victorian English. I find C&B to be the hardest, least enjoyable read of the bunch, and I imagine it must have scared many readers away from Tacitus over the years, not least since it's the translation found in nearly every generic edition of Tacitus since Modern Library adopted it in 1942. Similarly dreary and ubiquitous is Michael Grant's "The Annals of Imperial Rome." To quote R.B. Rutherford, "even the title combines inaccuracy with a whiff of Hollywood," but that's just the beginning. Grant modernizes terms like "centurion" and "legion" into "company commander" and "brigade" and ditches the chapter numbers and book divisions. The translation has been accused of placing readability above accuracy, but that's unfair to Grant, since his complete flattening out of the style and character of the original isn't actually readable at all. Donald Dudley's translation, notwithstanding its stiff-upper-lip Queen's English, is probably the best made in the 20th century, although it's long out of print. The recent translation by Woodman is the most literal, for which reason it's an ideal source for anyone studying Tacitus in Latin. While it's a fine scholarly work, I don't personally enjoy reading it by itself; if Tacitus didn't put a period somewhere, neither does Woodman, and for every off-brand word choice made by Tacitus, Woodman finds a suitably awkward English equivalent. In the "Note on the Text and Translation" of the book under review here, Yardley calls the Woodman "a fascinating version of Tacitean Latin into an English equivalent" and goes on to say "I hope my translation will be seen as a complement - and indeed a compliment - to Professor Woodman's, from which, replete as it is with new and interesting insights, I have learned much." And it's clear that Yardley has, for his translation is erudite without being stuffy, faithful without a slavish adherence to the idiosyncratic style of the original Latin and readable without obscuring the wit and soul of Tacitus.

This book is very easy to read and understand with the translation and makes a great foundation for the study of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Would recommend for anyone beginning a study of the Julio-Claudian emperors.

First, there are no hyperlinks to the end notes, which are essential in a work that can sometimes be obscure. A real pain in this work. Also, the rendering of this text and another Oxford world classics text I bought (Suetonius) is rendered very poorly so that when you search for a term, that term will often not show up because it does not recognize the word. This is also shown when you highlight a passage and go to "my highlights and notes" to find that the text often shows up garbled because it has been rendered poorly. The translation and notes are fine, but the problems I'm having with the text make this a bad purchase.

First of all, I purchased this book for a Classic Civilization class that I'm currently enrolled in that is solely dedicated to the Roman Emperor Nero, his reign, and the ultimate fall of the Julio-Claudian empire.

I have not read the book in its entirety (really I've only read sections pertaining to Nero, Agrippina, Octavia, Poppaea and so on), but it's an interesting bit of ancient Roman history. If you're a history buff, it may or may not be for you, depending on how "factual" you like your history. What I mean is that Tacitus' writing is in some, if not many cases unverifiable and sounds a little ridiculous. On other occasions, his information seems to generally agree with other historians who wrote about the same time periods. Always be suspicious of what he writes and always ask what his motives were.

before I purchase this, I was wondering what the difference this is between 'The Annals of Imperial Rome' also by Tacitus