This chapter examines Tacitus' representation of the legacy of civil war in his history of the Julio-Claudian period, the Annals, arguing that civil war persists during the pax Augusta as a kind of banalization of state violence against citizens, a political system that consumes its own. It studies Tacitus' multi-episode account of Nero's paranoid, possibly cynical, and ultimately self-defeating appropriation of civil war exempla to motivate the suppression of potential dissent.
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