Tacitus, a Roman senator writing in the early second century, composed the Annals, his history of the emperors from Tiberius through Nero. This is Book 16, the last surviving stretch. Book 15 left Rome after the fire of 64, the killing of Christians as scapegoats, and the Pisonian plot that ended in torture and forced suicide.

Nero’s later years become a harvest of the eminent. Thrasea Paetus, a senator of Stoic dignity — a philosophy of self-command and public duty — is destroyed because integrity is read as disloyalty. Barea Soranus falls with him. Courts gather estates. Elites must applaud the emperor’s singing and acting. Poppaea, Nero’s wife, dies in the household’s lethal passion. Judicial war replaces open civil war, for now. The Annals break off mid-tyranny; Nero’s fall in 68 lives in Tacitus’s Histories. What remains honors men whose resistance was witness rather than victory, and a peace bought with the freedom, and often the lives, of the outstanding.