The Senate's Story

Abstract

The Spanish inscriptions on bronze are making a fair bid to rival the Egyptian papyri in their contribution to our knowledge of the ancient world, at least as regards Roman history. Finds of the last twenty years have shed light on fundamental matters such as the Roman citizenship, electoral and senatorial procedures, imperial ideology, and the relation of the Princeps to the senate and other sections of the population. They have also contributed to our assessment of the ancient literary sources. Most deserving of mention here is the Tabula Siarensis, a bronze tablet discovered in the Roman province of Baetica in the south of Spain in I982, which records senatorial decrees passed in December of A.D. I9 in honour of Tiberius' adoptive son Germanicus who died in October of that year. The text overlaps with that on the fragmentary Tabula Hebana found in Etruria at the end of the Second World War, and helps to clarify the significance of that inscription. But the extravagant expressions of grief which it preserves also shed light on one of the most puzzling aspects of the Annals of Tacitus, namely, the amount of attention he devotes to the premature death of the young heir-apparent. Six or seven years later there emerged, again from the soil of Andalusia and again through the use of metal detectors, a still more remarkable document, a senatorial decree of A.D. 20 giving the official version of the trial of Cn. Calpurnius Piso for the murder of Germanicus and for serious political offences. The publication of this decree by Antonio Caballos, Werner Eck, and Fernando Fernandez in German and Spanish has been awaited with keen anticipation, but not, by the reasonable, with impatience. For six years is not long to wait for a full-scale discussion and analysis of one of the most important documents preserved from antiquity. Indeed the time has been well spent, and the publication is exemplary in every respect. One ingredient in making it so has been the determination of the editors to consult fully with the scholarly community at large. As a result they (and we) have reaped the fruit of their generosity in making the text accessible to other scholars, in presenting it to seminars in various countries, and in publishing preliminary discussions. In fact, the document and the editorial discussion have already been used to excellent effect by the editors of a major edition of Tacitus, Annals 3 (A. J. Woodman and R. H. Martin, The Annals of Tacitus, Book III (I996)), which appeared before the actual publication of the document. For a brief discussion, see above pp. 214-15. The new document is unusual, first, in giving us a complete senatus consultum. Not only is it the only Roman piece of legislation to survive in so many copies (at least six), but the major fragments are so extensive that we can reconstruct the whole document and feel reasonably confident that, with the exception of a few significant phrases, we have a complete and accurate text.' Fern'andez, one of the editors and the Director of the Archaeological Museum in Seville, is largely responsible for acquiring all the copies so far discovered, which were originally placed on the antiquities market. Unfortunately, since none of the tablets was found in the course of a regular archaeological excavation, their origin is not certain and their material context unknown. None the less, this senatorial decree provides vital information on constitutional, legal, financial, administrative, military, and prosopographical matters. In addition it places us 'in the unique position of being able to compare a lengthy and complete original document with an extended passage of Tacitean narrative', to borrow the grateful words of Woodman and Martin in the edition of Annals 3 (I 14) mentioned above.