Et sine auctore notissimi uersus. Unauthored Poetry and Rome’s Authoritarian Turn

This paper engages with the anonymous verses quoted by Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars. By analyzing several poems concerning Julius Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius, it shows how these powerful men had had to deal with an anonymous (and pseudonymous) anti-propaganda which involves different social backgrounds cooperating together from the stage of composition to that of circulation. The presence of these voices offers a means of testing the authoritarian climate and the different reactions between the three figures of power considered above.