Power and laughter: Imperial dicta

Papers of the British School at Rome

Volumn 67, Issue , 1999, Pages 183-197

  Laurence, Ray ^a   Paterson, Jeremy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85015110340     PISSN: 00682462     EISSN: 2045239X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0068246200004554     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. The text ‘Caesar’ is imprecise, but the emperor intended by Plutarch was probably Augustus. The identification is based primarily on the appropriateness of the anecdote to Augustus's concerns with marriage and fertility. See P. Städter, A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles (Chapel Hill, 1989), 53ff.
2. F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (London, 1977) made full use of reported statements of emperors. Some of those statements were, of course, derived from official sources, such as the Acta Senatus, and are in a rather different category from the ‘floating’ dicta, which are the main subject of this article.
3. Dicta share many of the problems highlighted about anecdotes by R. Sailer, ‘Anecdotes as historical evidence for the principate’, Greece and Rome 21 (1980), 69-83.
4. See also T. W. Africa, ‘Adam Smith, the wicked knight, and the use of anecdotes’, Greece and Rome 42 (1995), 70-75.
5. For Porcellus, see Seneca, Suasoriae 2.13 and Suetonius, De Grammaticis 22.1. The emendation of Dio's text to Marcellus and the identification with M. Claudius Marcellus Aeserninus has nothing to commend it (see now R. A. Kaster, Suetonius de Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (Oxford, 1995), 222).
6. Z. Yavetz, ‘The personality of Augustus: reflections on Syme's Roman Revolution’, in K.A. Raabflaub and M. Toher (eds), Between Republic and Empire (California, 1990), 21ff.
7. Cited by Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.1.44.
8. So, for example, Suetonius, Nero 39 and Galba 13.
9. Plutarch, Comparison of Demosthenes and Cicero 1 and Cicero 27.
10. P. Corbett, The Scurra (Scottish Classical Studies 2) (Edinburgh, 1986).
11. On the distinction between the abusive tone of dicax and the art associated with being witty, facetus, see Cicero, Orator 90.
12. J. P. Morel, ‘La iuventus et les origines du theatre Romain’, Revues des Études Latines Al (1970), 208ff.
13. C. Garton, Personal Aspects of the Roman Theatre (Toronto, 1972), 141-168.
14. Seneca, Controversiae 7.2.14.
15. Suetonius, Augustus 89.
16. On this see the wise comments of N. Horsfall, La cultura della plebs romana (Barcelona, 1996).
17. Recently well analysed by J. P. Toner, Leisure and Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1995) and.
18. C. H. Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1993).
19. Cicero, De Officiis 1.104, with an example in De Oratore 2.271.
20. O. Rossi, ‘De M. Catonis dictis et Apophthegmatis’, Athenaeum n.s. 2 (1924), 174ff. and.
21. A. Astin, Cato the Censor (Oxford, 1978), 186ff., although Astin does not show awareness of the tradition in which Cato was working.
22. See the learned article by J. Barns, ‘A new gnomologium: with some remarks on gnomic anthologies’, Classical Quarterly 44 (1950), 126-137 and n.s. 1, 1-19.
23. Now also A. Cameron, The Greek Anthology (Oxford, 1993), Iff. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.9 and Seneca, Epistulae 33, who advised against overreliance on maxims.
24. Not the work of Plutarch (see K. Ziegler, in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, s. v. ‘Plutarchos’, 863.16ff.). Although there is a clear relationship with Plutarch's Lives, it is not simply a collection culled from those works.
25. Cf. Vitruvius, De Architectura preface and Horace, Epistulae 2.1.4 (‘si longo sermone morer tua tempora, Caesar’).
26. On ancient concepts of personality see C. Gill, ‘The character-personality distinction’ and S. Halliwell, ‘Traditional Greek conceptions of character’ in C. Pelling (ed.), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford, 1990), Iff. and 32ff.
27. P. A. Städter, A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles (Chapel Hill, 1989), 53ff.
28. On the trend see S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great. Asser's ‘Life of King Alfred’ and other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), 46ff.
29. For the collection in the later Middle Ages, known as the Proverbs of Alfred, see the editions by O. Arngart (Lund, 1942-1955) and.
30. H. P. South (1931).
31. A. Wesselski, Angelo Polizianos Tagebuch (1477-1499) (Jena, 1929), ascribed it to Poliziano.
32. B. C. Bowen, ‘Roman jokes and the Renaissance prince, 1455-1528’, Illinois Classical Studies 9 (2) (1984), 137-148.
33. G. Townend, ‘The sources of the Greek in Suetonius’, Hermes (1960), 98ff.
34. R. Laurence, ‘History and female power’, in T. Cornell and K. Lomas (eds), Gender and Ethnicity in Ancient Italy (Accordio Specialist Studies on Italy 6) (London, 1997), 136-137.
35. On the verbal posturing involved in such incidents see now A. C. Cooley, ‘The moralising message of the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre’, Greece and Rome 45 (1998), 199. Ray Laurence and Jeremy Paterson.
36. For similar word play see Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.10. For other examples of dicta as rebukes see, for example, Suetonius, Vespasian 8, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Hadrian 21, Plutarch, Moralia 207E.