Annals
Tacitus' history of the early Roman empire, and the source of the observation that laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt.
ClassicSources & confidence: High confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Latin text and location of the corruption/laws phrase in Annals III.27.
- Tacitus: Annales III — Latin text
Exact Latin wording in chapter 27, within a narrative of Roman legislation.
- Wikidata entity API: Annals
Inspected entity label and description for identifier matching only; does not validate the work’s argument.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Passage checked, not manuscript variants or the work’s precise composition date. The essay’s reverse-causation argument is not contained in the quotation.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
The line the essay renders as "the more corrupt the state, the more numerous its laws" is Annals III.27, in Latin:
et corruptissima re publica plurimae leges
An English rendering is "laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt". The essay's version compresses a specific clause about Rome's own legislative history into a general aphorism, which is faithful in meaning but broader in scope than the original.
The essay's own gloss, that Tacitus "had the causation half right" and that it runs both ways, is doing more work than the quotation itself supports, and is the essay's argument rather than his.
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/works/tacitus-annals.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25