O adulador em Roma

Abstract

The description of characters has given rise to great interest in all periods and the Classical world has handed down a landmark work on the theme, Theophrastus’s Characters, where the flatterer doesn’t receive such deeply negative and derogatory connotations as one is bound to come across in other Latin authors. We have, as an example, made a brief survey of some Latin literature texts in which the flatterer is differently dealt with: in Terence’s Eunuch, in several works by Cicero, in Horace’s Epistles and The Art of Poetry, in Livy’s work, in Petronius’s Satiricon, in Seneca’s Epistles and Natural Questions, in Quintilian’s Institutiones and in Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars.