Powerful Words. Imperial Speeches of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty

There are no studies that classify and analyse the speeches ascribed to the Julio-Claudians.

POWO would be the first collection and classification of all statements attributed to the Julio-Claudian emperors, including dicta, sententiae, speeches, and dialogues, both those included in official imperial documents, containing self-constructions and those reported in literary sources, which convey constructions of emperors in historiography.

No study analyses the function of Julio-Claudians' speeches concerning the strategies of communication. POWO intends to fill this gap and produce the first collection and classification of imperial speeches.

By supplying an extensive analysis of imperial statements, POWO will investigate the intra-textual and inter-textual levels and identify tragic and rhetorical patterns emerging from these speeches.

POWO does not aim to study imperial speeches to ascertain their historical verisimilitude but rather to investigate their use in modelling the representation of the princeps as the archetypical character, who conveys the author’s political judgement.

POWO relies on two ground distinctions: the first draws a line between official imperial documents (containing self-constructions) and the literary texts (including constructions of emperors); the second between statements reported in direct speech (oratio recta) and those transmitted in indirect speech (oratio obliqua).

POWO will embrace multiple and interdisciplinary approaches: Alongside established scholarly techniques of textual philology, textual criticism, close reading of texts, and source criticism, it will use literary theory, the pragmatics of communication (including politeness and impoliteness theory), doublespeak theory, and adopt a historiographic perspective for contextualisation to reconstruct the voices of the Julio-Claudians.