PIETRO da EBOLI. — Poet of the second half of the 12th century.
He is the author of a trilogy in verse on the models of Virgil and Ovid, in which a politico-religious conception of the Empire is championed (unus augustus..., unus sol, unus pastor, una fides), which would receive fuller development in Dante’s De monarchia. In the poem Liber ad honorem Augusti (1195), also called De rebus Siculis carmen (ed. E. Rota, in RIS, XXXI, pp. 1 sqq.), he denounces Norman policy and extols that of the Swabians, particularly the deeds of Emperor Henry VI and the figure of Empress Constance; in a second poem now lost, Gesta Federici, he had celebrated Barbarossa; in the De balneis Puteolani, consisting of epigrams each of six couplets (the work is also known in various vernacular versions; V. E. Percopo, Napoli 1887 and M. Pelaez, in Studi romanzi, 19 (1928), pp. 47-134), he praises the benefits of the thirty-five springs of Pozzuoli.