“Non sapevo che avesse un naso così grande!”. Note sull’excerptum De sententiis 57 di Pietro Patrizio e le fonti aneddotiche di Cassio Dione e Tacito.

This paper analyses the excerptum de sententiis 57 from Peter the Patrician, a text descending from Cassius Dio (LXII 14, 1), which depicts the tyrant Nero mocking the cut-off head of his cousin, Rubellius Plautus, and pronouncing a cruel sententia. The comparison between the parallel texts by Xiphilinus and Peter the Patrician and moreover those by Dio and Tacitus, leads to the following hypothesis: in this case (Plautus), as well as in other cases (Faustus Sulla, Agrippina, Pythias, Thrasea Paetus, Barea Soranus, Antistius Vetus), the common ‘minor’ source, used by Tacitus and also by Dio (and not depending the latter historian on the former), would have been C. Fannius (FRHist 93), a lawyer and friend of Pliny the Younger, who collected anecdotes about the victims of Nero.