great man, Tacitus considers Nero as simply despicable. Provenance and authenticity Since the 18th century, at least five attempts have been made to challenge the authenticity of the Annals as having been written by someone other than Tacitus, Voltaire's criticism being perhaps the first. Voltaire was generally critical of Tacitus and said that Tacitus did not comply with the standards for providing a historical background to civilization. In 1878, John Wilson Ross and, in 1890, Polydore Hochart suggested that the whole of the Annals had been forged by the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). According to Robert Van Voorst this was an "extreme hypothesis" which never gained a following among modern scholars. The provenance of the manuscripts containing the Annals goes back to the Renaissance. While Bracciolini had discovered three minor works at Hersfeld Abbey in Germany in 1425, Zanobi da Strada (who died in 1361) had probably earlier discovered Annals 11–16 at Monte Cassino where he lived for some time. The copies of Annals at Monte Cassino were probably moved to Florence by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), a friend of da Strada, who is also credited with their discovery at Monte Cassino. Regardless of whether the Monte Cassino manuscripts were moved to Florence by Boccaccio or da Strada, Boccaccio made use of the Annals when he wrote Commento di Dante c. 1374 (before the birth of Poggio Bracciolini), giving an account of Seneca's death directly based on the Tacitean account in Annals book 15. Francis Newton states that it is likely that Annals 11–16 were in Monte Cassino during the first half of the rule of Abbot Desiderius (1058–1087) who later became Pope Victor III. Annals 1–6 were then independently discovered at Corvey Abbey in Germany in 1508 by Giovanni Angelo Arcimboldi, afterwards Archbishop of Milan, and were first published in Rome in 1515 by Beroaldus, by order of Pope Leo X, who afterwards deposited the manuscript in the Medicean Library in Florence. In popular culture In Donna Leon's third Commissario Brunetti novel Dressed for Death (1994), the protagonist reads Tacitus' Annals in his spare time in the evenings, and various references to that material are made throughout the novel. In Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita Tacitus’ Annals is referenced, as the MASSOLIT editor Berlioz asserts that its mention of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is a spurious interjection, added later, and not written by Tacitus. In Jorge Luis