In this volume, nine contributions deal with the ways in which imperial power was exercised in the fourth century AD, paying particular attention to how it was articulated and manipulated by means of literary strategies and iconographic programmes.
In this volume, Hugh Elton offers a detailed and up to date history of the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Beginning with the crisis of the third century, he covers the rise of Christianity, the key Church Councils, the fall of the West to the Barbarians, the Justinianic reconquest, and concludes with the twin wars against Persians and Arabs in the seventh century AD. Elton isolates two major themes that emerge in this period. He notes that a new form of decision-making was created, whereby committees debated civil, military, and religious matters before the emperor, who was the final arbiter. Elton also highlights the evolution of the relationship between aristocrats and the Empire, and provides new insights into the mechanics of administering the Empire, as well as frontier and military policies. Supported by primary documents and anecdotes, The Roman Empire in Late Antiquity is designed for use in undergraduate courses on late antiquity and early medieval history.
McEvoy addresses the phenomenon of the Roman child-emperor during the late fourth century. Tracing the course of their reigns, the book looks at the sophistication of the Roman system of government which made their accessions possible, and the adaptation of existing imperial ideology to portray boys as young as six as viable rulers.
Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire offers new analysis of the textual depictions of a series of emperors in the fourth century within overlapping historical, religious, and literary contexts. Drawing on the recent Representational Turn in the study of imperial power, these essays examine how literary authors working in various genres, both Latin and Greek, and of differing religious affiliations construct and manipulate the depiction of a series of emperors from the late third to the late fourth centuries CE. In a move away from traditional source criticism, this volume opens up new methodological approaches to chart intellectual and literary history during a critical century for the ancient Mediterranean world.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Contested Monarchy reappraises the wide-ranging and lasting transformation of the Roman monarchy between the Principate and Late Antiquity. The book takes as its focus the century from Diocletian to Theodosius I (284-395), a period during which the stability of monarchical rule depended heavily on the emperor's mobility, on collegial or dynastic rule, and on the military resolution of internal political crises. At the same time, profound religious changes modified the premises of political interaction and symbolic communication between the emperor and his subjects, and administrative and military readjustments changed the institutional foundations of the Roman monarchy. This volume concentrates on the measures taken by emperors of this period to cope with the changing framework of their rule. The collection examines monarchy along three distinct yet intertwined fields: Administering the Empire, Performing the Monarchy, and Balancing Religious Change. Each field possesses its own historiography and methodology, and accordingly has usually been treated separately. This volume's multifaceted approach builds on recent scholarship and trends to examine imperial rule in a more integrated fashion. With new work from a wide range of international scholars, Contested Monarchy offers a fresh survey of the role of the Roman monarchy in a period of significant and enduring change.
With The Emperor and the Army in the Later Roman Empire, AD 235–395 Mark Hebblewhite offers the first study solely dedicated to examining the nature of the relationship between the emperor and his army in the politically and militarily volatile later Roman Empire. Bringing together a wide range of available literary, epigraphic and numismatic evidence he demonstrates that emperors of the period considered the army to be the key institution they had to mollify in order to retain power and consequently employed a range of strategies to keep the troops loyal to their cause. Key to these efforts were imperial attempts to project the emperor as a worthy general (imperator) and a generous provider of military pay and benefits. Also important were the honorific and symbolic gestures each emperor made to the army in order to convince them that they and the empire could only prosper under his rule.
This is the first systematic treatment in English by an historian of the nature, aims and efficacy of public law in late imperial Roman society from the third to the fifth century AD. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, and using the writings of lawyers and legal anthropologists, as well as those of historians, the book offers new interpretations of central questions: What was the law of late antiquity? How efficacious was late Roman law? What were contemporary attitudes to pain, and the function of punishment? Was the judicial system corrupt? How were disputes settled? Law is analysed as an evolving discipline, within a framework of principles by which even the emperor was bound. While law, through its language, was an expression of imperial power, it was also a means of communication between emperor and subject, and was used by citizens, poor as well as rich, to serve their own ends.
Theodosius II (AD 408–450) was the longest reigning Roman emperor. Ever since Edward Gibbon, he has been dismissed as mediocre and ineffectual. Yet Theodosius ruled an empire which retained its integrity while the West was broken up by barbarian invasions. This book explores Theodosius' challenges and successes. Ten essays by leading scholars of late antiquity provide important new insights into the court at Constantinople, the literary and cultural vitality of the reign, and the presentation of imperial piety and power. Much attention has been directed towards the changes promoted by Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century; much less to their crystallisation under Theodosius II. This volume explores the working out of new conceptions of the Roman Empire - its history, its rulers and its God. A substantial introduction offers a new framework for thinking afresh about the long transition from the classical world to Byzantium.
Evolving from a patrician domus, the emperor's residence on the Palatine became the centre of the state administration. Elaborate ceremonial regulated access to the imperial family, creating a system of privilege which strengthened the centralised power. Constantine followed the same model in his new capital, under a Christian veneer. The divine attributes of the imperial office were refashioned, with the emperor as God's representative. The palace was an imitation of heaven. Following the loss of the empire in the West and the Near East, the Palace in Constantinople was preserved – subject to the transition from Late Antique to Mediaeval conditions – until the Fourth Crusade, attracting the attention of Visgothic, Lombard, Merovingian, Carolingian, Norman and Muslim rulers. Renaissance princes later drew inspiration for their residences directly from ancient ruins and Roman literature, but there was also contact with the Late Byzantine court. Finally, in the age of Absolutism the palace became again an instrument of power in vast centralised states, with renewed interest in Roman and Byzantine ceremonial. Spanning the broadest chronological and geographical limits of the Roman imperial tradition, from the Principate to the Ottoman empire, the papers in the volume treat various aspects of palace architecture, art and ceremonial.