Alternate Empires: Tacitus's Virtual History of the Pisonian Principate

O'Gorman analyses the significance of a distinct but "virtual" dynasty, the Pisones, whose presence overarches and intertwines the narratives of Tacitus's Histories and Annals: (a) Germanicus's rival Piso in Annals 1, (b) the Piso who unsuccessfully challenged Nero in Annals 15, (c) Galba's short-lived successor, Piso, in Histories 1, (d) the son of the Neronian challenger, Calpurnius Galerianus, put to death by order of Mucianus (Histories 4.11), and (e) Galerianus's cousin, Lucius Piso, proconsul of Africa, killed on suspicion of imperial aspirations (Histories 4.48-49). Tacitus at different points gestures towards an alternative history, which runs parallel to the actual history of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties. Taken together, these Pisones underscore the curious role of the past in both configuring them as imperial contenders and, at the same time, presenting them as extraordinarily passive, even paralysed, in relation to political action. The paper argues that speculation about alternatives can be situated in the Roman tradition of suasoriae and compares the different ways in which the virtual historian and the suasor deal with counterfactuals.