Tacitus, a Roman senator writing in the early second century, composed the Annals, a history of emperors from Tiberius through Nero. This is Book 13. In Book 12 Claudius dies in 54, is made a god, and Agrippina — his niece and wife — puts her teenage son Nero on the throne, with the philosopher Seneca and Burrus, commander of the emperor’s Guard, as tutors.

Nero’s first years wear a decent face. Seneca and Burrus guide him; he hunts popularity with shows and gifts. Agrippina’s grip slips as Acte, a freedwoman, and then Poppaea draw him from his mother. Britannicus, Claudius’s blood son, dies at a banquet, poison in the water of a tasting-game. In the East, Corbulo wages an old-fashioned war for Armenia while the Palatine, Rome’s imperial hill, learns luxury and song. Treason charges have not gone away. Burrus’s hold on the Guard is still the stabilizer. Tacitus’s Nero is a youth at a fork: capable of government, already practicing crime, watched by a mother who made him and cannot keep him.