Sull’autore del P.Herc. 1067: una nuova lettura della subscriptio

The paper presents a new reading of the subscriptio of P. Herc. 1067 emerged from a recent autoptic examination of the entire roll. The text con- tained in the papyrus is usually identified with an Oratio in Senatu habita ante principem in agreement with the conclusion reached by Felice Costa- bile in a study published in 1984. The preservation of the roll’s final title has been brought to scholars’ attention by Gianluca Del Mastro in 2005, when he also showed that the subscriptio associated by Costabile to P. Herc. 1475 actually belongs to P. Herc. 1067. The examination of the original confirms Del Mastro’s hypothesis about the erroneous association of the final title of P. Herc. 1067 with P. Herc. 1475, but it also shows that the first letters of the title are not compatible with L. Ma [ nli Torqua]t[ i, as proposed by Costabile. By contrast, the palaeographic evidence clearly shows that the text contained in P. Herc. 1067 was written by a member of the Annaei fam- ily. Moving from this point and taking into consideration other tiny traces of ink preserved in that line of the subscriptio, the present paper challenges the identification of the text with an oration delivered in the Senate and pro- poses instead to identify its author with Seneca the Elder, whose authorship is also supported by thematic and chronological considerations.