Seiano e il nuovo modello europeo di favorito

This paper explores the early modern reinvention of Sejanus as a political archetype and situates his seventeenth-century revival within the broader European rise of the minister-favorite. Although Pierre Matthieu’s 1617 Ælius Seianus implicitly identified the Roman prefect with Concino Concini after his assassination, this association should not be read as a purely French invention. Rather, it formed part of a wider transformation in political discourse linked to the Spanish valimiento, especially under the Duke of Lerma. Sejanus proved uniquely adaptable to this new context. Ancient historians, particularly Tacitus and Cassius Dio, described him not merely as a court favorite but as an alter imperator, exercising quasi-sovereign authority and overshadowing Tiberius himself. This feature distinguished him from other historical favorites. His power appeared absolute, yet it rested entirely on personal favor. When that favor collapsed, his fall was sudden, violent, and spectacular: public humiliation, execution, and the desecration of his corpse by the Roman crowd. In the late sixteenth century, neo-Stoic thinkers such as Justus Lipsius had already used Sejanus to illustrate the fragility of courtly fortune. However, with the emergence of the minister-favorite as a structural mode of governance—first in Spain, then in England and France—the figure acquired a sharper polemical function. He no longer exemplified merely the instability of Fortune, but the illegitimacy of delegated sovereignty. Sejanus became the prototype of the overmighty minister who governed “as if” he were king. Across Europe, from Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall to French and Spanish pamphlets, the story was mobilized to denounce ministerial tyranny while preserving the monarch’s authority. The fall of the favorite was represented not as a threat to order, but as its restoration. In this way, Sejanus became a performative political model: a warning to kings and a weapon against their ministers.