| Zusammenfassung: | In this article, I discuss Tacitus' narrative technique in the beginning-of-year sections of Annals 13-16, the books of Nero. Tacitus introduces a new year with various formulae in Annals 1-6, but in the later books his desire for variatio seems to cease: in fact, all extant year-beginnings, except for two, are introduced by a standard ablative absolute of the type x y consulibus. The standard formula, I argue, reflects the political irrelevance of the consuls, who become, so to speak, 'sclerotic' dating devices. The two exceptions to the ablative absolute formula, on the other hand, are not chance occurrences. Tacitus purportedly wished to draw attention to two years: the year 58, whose consuls were the descendants of the consuls of 31 B.C., and the year 65, the longest narrative of the extant Annals, disproportionately devoted to one event, the Pisonian Conspiracy.
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