Among the most potent devices that Roman emperors had at their disposal to disavow autocratic aims and to put on display the consensus of ruler and ruled was the artful refusal of exceptional powers, or recusatio imperii. The practice had a long history in Rome prior to the reign of Augustus, but it was Augustus especially who, over the course of several decades, perfected the recusatio as a means of performing his hesitancy towards power. The poets of the Augustan period were similarly well practised in the art of refusal, writing dozens of poetic recusationes that purported to refuse offers urged upon them by their patrons, or by the greater expectations of the Augustan age, to take on projects. It is the purpose of this paper to put the one type of refusal alongside the other, in order to show to what extent the refusals of the Augustan poets are informed not just by aesthetic principles that derive, most obviously, from Callimachus, but by the many, high-profile acts of denial that were performed as political art by the emperor himself.

This article investigates the use, in Pliny's official writings of imperial praise, of the theme of ‘divine comedy’ – the idea that everything is for the best in the imperial world under the ideal emperor. An examination of this prominent theme can help us understand how Pliny handled the inevitable tensions in an imperial ideology which was grounded in the opposing figures of the ‘good’ emperor who deserved deification, and the ‘bad’ emperor who deserved tyrannicide.