Panegyrici Latini

The "Panegyrici Latini" or "Latin Panegyrics" is a collection of twelve ancient Roman panegyric orations.

Contents

The collection comprises the following speeches:
# by Pliny the Younger. It was originally a speech of thanks ("gratiarum actio") for the consulship, which he held in 100, and was delivered in the Senate in honour of Emperor Trajan. He later revised and considerably expanded the work, which for this reason is by far the longest of the whole collection. Pliny presents Trajan as the ideal ruler, or "optimus princeps", to the reader, and contrasts him with his predecessor Domitian.
# by Pacatus in honour of Emperor Theodosius I, delivered in Rome in 389.
# by Claudius Mamertinus in honour of Emperor Julian, delivered in Constantinople in 362, also as a speech of thanks at his assumption of the office of consul of that year.
# by Nazarius. It was delivered in Rome before the Senate in 321 at the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the accession of Constantine I and the fifth anniversary of his sons Crispus and Constantine II (emperor) becoming "caesares". The speech is peculiar because none of the honoured emperors was present at its delivery, and because it celebrates Constantine's victory over Maxentius (at the Battle of Milvian Bridge) in 312, avoiding almost any reference to contemporaneous events.
# from the year 311, delivered in Trier by an anonymous orator, who gives thanks to Constantine I for a tax relief for his home town Autun.
# by an anonymous (yet different) author, also delivered at the court in Trier in 310, at the occasion of Constantine's "quinquennalia" (fifth anniversary of accession) and the founding day of the city of Trier. It contains the description of an appearance of the sun god Apollo to Constantine, which has often been regarded as a model of Constantine's later Christian vision. Also, the speech promulgates the legend that the emperor Claudius II was Constantine's ancestor.
# by an anonymous author delivered at the wedding of Constantine to Maximian's daughter Fausta in 307, probably also at Trier, and it therefore contains the praise of both emperors and their achievements. The bride and the wedding feature only to a very limited degree in the oration.
# celebrates the reconquest of Britain by Constantius Chlorus, "caesar" of the tetrarchy, from Allectus in 296. The speech was probably delivered in 297 in Trier, then the residence of Constantius.
# is the second speech in the collection where the emperor was not present. It is by Eumenius, teacher of rhetoric at Autun, and is directed at the governor of the province of Gallia Lugdunensis. It was most probably delivered in 297/298, either in Autun or Lyon. Apart from its main subject, the restoration of the school of rhetoric at Autun, it praises the achievements of the emperors of the tetrarchy, especially those of Constantius.
# from the year 289 (and therefore the earliest of the late antique speeches of the collection), at Trier in honour of Maximian at the occasion of the founding day of the city of Rome. According to a disputed manuscript tradition, the author was a certain Mamertinus, who is identified with the author of the next speech.
# from 291, also at Trier to Maximian, at the emperor's birthday. It is often attributed to Mamertinus, probably "magister memoriae" (private secretary) of Maximian, though the manuscript is corrupted and the authorship not entirely certain.
# by an anonymous orator, delivered in Trier in 313, celebrating (and describing extensively) Constantine's victory over Maxentius in 312.

Origin and tradition of the collection

The formation of the "Panegyrici Latini" is usually divided into two or three phases. At first, there was a collection of five speeches by various anonymous authors from Autun, containing numbers 5 through 9 above. Later, the speeches 10 and 11, which are connected to Trier, were appended; when 12 joined the collection, is uncertain. At some later date, most probably c. 400, the speeches 2, 3 and 4 were added; they differ from the earlier orations because they were delivered outside of Gaul (in Rome and Constantinople), and because the names of their authors are preserved. Pliny's panegyric was set at the beginning of the collection as classical model of the genre. Sometimes the author of the last speech, Pacatus, is credited with the final "corpus".

Only one manuscript of the "Panegyrici Latini" has survived into the 15th century, when it was discovered in 1433 in a monastery in Mainz, Germany by Johannes Aurispa. The manuscript was copied several times, but then lost again.

References

*Galletier, Édouard. "Panégyriques latins", 3 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1949, 1952, 1955. [Latin and French, with extensive introductions to the collection as a whole and each of the speeches; does not include Pliny's speech.]
*Mynors, R.A.B., "XII Panegyrici Latini". Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. [Latin text.]
*Nixon, C.E.V., and Barbara Saylor Rodgers. "In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini". Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. [English translation and commentary with the Latin text of Mynors, also without Pliny.]
*Rees, Roger. "Layers of Loyalty in Latin Panegyric: AD 289–307". New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. [Commentary on panegyrics X(2), XI(3), VII(4), IX(5), and VII(6).]

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