In two letters addressed to a certain Montanus, Pliny’s focus is on the once powerful imperial freedman Pallas. In his first letter (7.29) Pliny tells how he accidentally came across Pallas’ tomb and read an inscription engraved on it, which he now quotes as a particularly blatant example of the freedman’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Pliny’s feelings about Pallas are those of indignatio mitigated by risus; both words evoke satire and in fact references to satire and other literary genres (paradoxography, antiquarian literature and the palliata) are scattered throughout this short letter. In the second letter of this pair (8.6), we are told that Pliny, now took the trouble to trace the senatorial decree referred to in the inscription. Thus for a moment we encounter Pliny the historian, or rather Pliny the antiquarian – but he is quickly replaced by Pliny the political moralist. Pliny voices his indignation at the senators’ debasement but, crucially, does not give any details about the reasons for honouring Pallas or the circumstances behind it. Evidently Pliny did not deem it advisable to consult available historical accounts of the event and to learn more about its context (see Tac. Ann. 12.53 and cf. Plin. HN 35.201).

Dio in his imperial narrative has a distinctive technique of evaluating emperors, based on how he saw the informational constraints of the monarchical state. He tends to frame his assessments of emperors as descriptions of how they were perceived by contemporaries rather than as his own unique insights into how they ‘really’ were. This chapter applies James C. Scott's concept of ‘public transcripts’ and ‘hidden transcripts’ to Dio’s methodological statements and then his narrative of the Julio-Claudian, Flavian and Antonine emperors. Dio is a self-consciously acute and skeptical observer of the performance of imperial power and the reception of that performance by contemporary observers. This for him is a major component of what historiography exists to record in an environment where the actual realities of power politics cannot be fully known or discussed. The chapter concludes by looking at how this narrative stance changes in Dio’s contemporary narrative, in which he is a personal witness, but the emperors are youthful figureheads, whose performances become ever more detached from either the realities of politics or the experience of the senatorial aristocracy.