Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The First (1996) Edition of the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre: A ReviewEdward ChamplinWerner Eck, Antonio Caballos, and Fernando Fernández, eds. Das Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996. xiv 1 329 pp. 20 pls. Cloth, DM 142. (Vestigia 48)Can a committee write a report? Yes and no. The question of authorship is relevant as much to the book under review as to the extraordinary text which it presents.The document is a very long Latin inscription (176 lines) recording a decree of the Senate passed late in a.d. 20 after the trial, suicide, and posthumous condemnation of Cn. Calpurnius Piso, the former legate of Syria. Copies began to turn up, all within the boundaries of Roman Baetica, in the late 1980s, one virtually complete, one partial, and fragments of some four or five other versions. Appropriately, their first publication has appeared in two versions, the one under review here in German, the other in Spanish. Most of the material is shared by both volumes, but the German edition adds a concluding chapter on the political importance of the document, while the Spanish version has considerably more on the physical properties of the bronze tablets and on the Spanish historical context—and on it the authors’ names are offered in alphabetical order. The German text scrupulously presents itself throughout as having three authors, and no hint is given as to who was responsible for which section. Let us speculate. The first three chapters, on the origins of the texts, on their physical condition, along with diplomatic transcriptions of each copy, and on the reconstruction and translation of the original text as received in Baetica, may represent the work of a team, but the subsequent chapters (4, prosopographical information; 5, the date of the trial; 6, commentary; 7, the transmission of the text to and within Baetica; and 8, the senatus consultum as political document) all bear the clear imprint of Werner Eck. That is, the prose is lapidary (Eck seems incapable of ambiguity or ellipsis); the erudition is [End Page 117] formidable; the argumentation is thorough, balanced, and imaginative; and the relative rapidity of publication is astonishing. Above all, Eck has made the book a work of truly international collaboration: between 1991 and 1996 he discussed the text at colloquia and at seminars in 38 universities (“among others”); some 60 scholars are thanked for help and criticism; and the notes are replete with specific acknowledgments to these and yet others for written and verbal comments and for reviews of unpublished work. The result is a formidable edition, clearly setting out the terms for future debates. Thus, appropriately for a decree of the Senate, the book is the work of one author, or of three, or of scores: for convenience we will call the author(s) E.As word of the SCPP’s discovery spread, scholarly excitement grew, for two reasons, one historiographical, one historical. Here is a contemporary version of a dramatic crisis familiar from the riveting account in Tacitus (Ann. 2.41–3.19): the bitter enmity between Tiberius’ legate Piso and Tiberius’ nephew and adopted son Germanicus Caesar, the suspicious death of Germanicus in 19, Piso’s trial and suicide, the passions of the plebs, the tensions within the domus Augusta and the Senate, and the brooding ambiguity of the princeps. Hence we can perhaps peer over the shoulder of Rome’s greatest historian in his study as he selects and shapes his material. At the same time, we are also offered a posed, but vivid and detailed, snapshot of power and ideology in the new principate at a time when the roles of the partners in government—that is, the princeps, his colleague (if any), and the Senate—are still being defined and the threat of civil war is still a real terror. And beyond these the document is a trove of information, constitutional, administrative, legal (both private and criminal), economic, linguistic, religious, prosopographical, topographical. To take but one instance, light is cast on several words in the evolving vocabulary of power, for here we find the earliest use of the word donativum in the sense of...