Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.

[Nathan Ross]

He had already named the consuls for AD60, Nero for the fourth time and Cornelius Cossus.

Yes, and I think that might hold a clue to his method. Tacitus names the consuls (Annals 14.20) and then the events of the that year: Nero's activities in Rome, a comet, and Corbulo's ongoing conflict in the east, including a lengthy summer campaign against the Mardi and the capture of Tigranocerta, culminating in Corbulo being made governor of Syria.

However, Corbulo's campaign most likely happened, or at least began, in 59, and his governorship of Syria was in 60. Tacitus is grouping these events together and allotting them to particular years to suit his annalistic method - perhaps indeed depending on when news of the events reached Rome, so he can integrate events at home and abroad. What he is not doing, I would say, is writing strictly chronological history in the manner of a modern historian.

So the events that Tacitus describes could and indeed almost certainly did spill out of the dates to which he assigns them, with some of them actually happening the year before. I believe a similar thing might be happening with his narration of the Boudica revolt - he assigns the gravis clades to the consulate of Paetus and Turpilianus firstly to indicate that annalistic time has now moved on since the previous events in Rome and Armenia, and secondly to integrate the revolt itself with the subsequent appointment of Turpilianus to the governorship of Britain.