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.