American Journal of Philology

The present special issue of the American Journal of Philology is devoted to the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre ( SCPP). ¹ It grew up around the APA/AIA Joint Seminar on that subject which was part of the program at the annual meeting in Chicago in 1997. In addition to the three papers presented at that seminar and the formal response to them, this collection contains a critical text of the document, an English translation, photographic plates of the most complete version of the text (Copy A), a bibliography of editions, reviews, and discussions of the document, a new review of the inscription’s initial publication, an essay on a closely related text, and an essay on a literary account of the events that generated the document.

The SCPP is a substantial document, running to 176 lines in Copy A, a bronze tablet of approximately 118 3 45 cm. Six or seven copies have been found in Spain alone. The inscription reports the Senate’s decisions in the trial of Cn. Calpurnius Piso and his associates in Rome in the year a.d. 20. A lengthy text on a crucial event from a central period of the Principate will naturally offer information for and reveal problems in our understanding of many areas of Roman history. The SCPP thus joins the Tabula Siarensis to give us a glimpse, unseen before the 1980s, of the Senate’s corporate self-presentation in this period: the Senate addresses in turn the immortal gods, the emperor, members of the imperial family in descending importance, the equestrian ordo, the populace, and the soldiers, positioning itself carefully (and differently) vis-à- vis each. The Senate ensures that the decree will be seen throughout the empire by ordering publication in the most frequented spot of the most populous city of each province and in the winter quarters of every legion (lines 165–72). Furthermore, because the decree responds to events to which Tacitus devoted an important section of his first three Tiberian books, it provides an external (though far from unproblematic) check on Tacitus’ account of the trial and the events that led up to it. [End Page 1]

Copies A and B were found in the modern province of Sevilla. Copy A’s provenance seems to point to the ancient Irni. Copy B’s place of origin was initially believed to be ancient Olaurum, but a location in the vicinity of El Tejar has now surfaced as another possibility. Like the remaining fragments (Copies C, D, E, and F, containing only a few letters each), all pieces of A and B came to light during illegal “excavations.” This circumstance will most likely render more precise localization impossible, but all the available information about the various copies points at present to the Roman province of Baetica as their original source. All the pieces are now housed together in the Archaeological Museum of Seville.

Copy A begins with the heading “Decree of the Senate Concerning the Elder Cn. Piso, put up for view when N. Vibius Serenus was proconsul” ( senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre propositum N. Vibio Sereno procos.). This is inscribed across the top of the tablet’s four columns in letters much larger than those used for the text of the decree (see Plates I–VIII). This heading is not found in Copy B, where the first three lines of the text itself are simply written in letters larger than those of the remaining lines, with the first line displaying letters somewhat larger than the second and third. Copy A’s heading offers us a glimpse at the procedure involved in displaying a decree composed in Rome for an empire-wide audience; it was the governor of the province who initiated the process of public display at the provincial level. Yet the fact that Copy B lacks this heading suggests that the process that resulted in the creation of these two (and presumably other) copies was not entirely uniform.

Further discrepancies between the two copies include their physical layout—Copy A consists of four columns with 176 lines of text, Copy B of two columns with 127 lines—and...