Re-presenting Piso: Poetic and Political Agenda in the Laus Pisonis

The anonymous author of Laus Pisonis seeks simultaneously to promote Piso’s political image by investing him with impressive virtutes (to which he had no claim) and to secure the great man’s patronage. In this give-and-take transaction, he argues, both parties emerge as winners: Piso by securing a promising praeco virtutis at a crucial moment in his political career (around A.D. 65), the poet from the “job security” as Piso’s client. Downplaying materialistic concerns, the author evokes the Muses to link panegyric and poetic agenda, with multiple (Horatian) allusions to flatter Piso’s literary culture and demonstrate their shared values.