In the introductory chapter I had already started to examine how Tacitus' designation of the Augustan regime as a versus status potentially draws a line of continuity between the principate and the civil wars which that regime claims to have resolved. Tacitus' use of the phrase, therefore, can be seen to dissent from the totalising claims of the principate: claims to order, stability, and continuity with a pre-civil war (republican) past. In contrast, Tacitus offers a different totalising claim about the principate: that it manifests the very same destructive elements of disorder within its regime. Thereby he counters the claim to continuity (totalising boundlessness) by redescribing it as a chaotic (totalising) boundlessness achieved by the collapse of definitions. This entails, most importantly, the collapse of the boundary between principate and civil war. I have gestured towards this ironic redescription by deploying the Virgilian phrase imperium sine fine, ‘empire without end’, in this Tacitean context where, I would argue, it becomes ‘empire without definition’.