Forging the Enemy: Fakeness, Invective, and Politics in the Panegyrici Latini and the Historia Augusta

This paper explores the interconnection of fakeness, invective, and politics in the collection of the Panegyrici Latini and the imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta. It shows that late rhetoricians and historians intermingled blame devices and fake narratives to demolish the moral and political authority of “bad” emperors and usurpers. It also demonstrates that fakeness played a key role in the subjective, ideologically oriented, reconstruction of the historical events that occurred in the later Roman Empire. “Fictional invective” emerges, then, as a not negligible aspect of the structural pattern of imperial praise and biography, beyond the boundaries of historical reliability.