This article offers a detailed analysis of the penalties imposed on Cn. Calpurnius Piso pater in AD 20 after he had been posthumously convicted of maiestas (treason). Piso was accused of leaving his province (Syria) without permission and then returning to try to retake it after the death of Germanicus in AD 19. He was also believed by many to be implicated in the death of Germanicus. The details of his case have been revealed by a new inscription from Spain, the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone patre, which was first published in 1996. Part of this long and well-preserved inscription records the post-mortem sanctions against memory imposed by the senate and Tiberius on Piso after his suicide. The verdicts for his family members and accomplices are also included. The decree was posted on bronze in the major cities of the Empire and in the winter quarters of all the legions. The article argues for the following conclusions. The decree should be taken at face value and its punishments considered harsh for a member of the Roman office-holding élite. It was widely published throughout the Empire after there had been extravagant mourning for Germanicus. Consequently, it seems that post-mortem disgrace did not necessarily involve the family as a whole. Indeed, sanctions against memory appear to be consciously designed to preserve the Roman élite family, its assets, and social position by removing its erring member. Such sanctions reveal both a tension and an accommodation between remembering and forgetting, between the family and the community, between history and memory.
The fabula praetexta is a category of Roman drama about which we are poorly informed. Ancient testimonia are scanty and widely scattered, while surviving fragments comprise fewer than fifty lines. Only five or six titles are firmly attested. Scholarly debate, however, has been extensive, and has especially focused on reconstructing the plots of the plays.1 The main approach has been to amplify extant fragments by fitting them into a plot taken from treatments of the same episode in later historical sources such as Livy, Dionysius, or Plutarch.2 This method was extended by Mommsen and others in their efforts to identify new titles and plots by isolating passages in the historians which seem written in a dramatic style, and could therefore be interpreted as derivations from historical plays.3 Such a line of approach is both risky and subjective. It is based on the desire to recover a lost genre, which modern scholars feel must or should have existed. It is tempting to imagine that the Romans would have encouraged a thriving national theatre on historical themes. Such a genre, it is argued, would have been influential in shaping the average Roman's view of past events and the treatment of famous episodes by later historians.4 The conclusions reached have virtually no basis in the ancient sources we actually have. The result is largely a fiction created by the scholarly imagination.
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