Family, dynasty, and the construction of legitimacy from Augustus to the Theodosians 1

Abstract

This chapter explores the consequences of the debate about dynastic legitimacy for imperial successions between the first century and the fifth. It argues that dynastic considerations were central to Roman imperial succession arrangements from the first century to the fifth, with a notable upsurge in late antiquity with the Constantinian and Valentinianic-Theodosian houses. The book examines how, in the first two centuries of the Principate, the imperial office came to be defined as something that could be inherited, and therefore the extent to which a dynastic principle can be said to have existed. According to the Augustan settlements after the late Republican civil wars, the emperor’s position was defined obliquely as an amalgamation of traditional magistracies, although Augustus himself studiously omitted any explicit mention that the holding of such executive offices concurrently by a single individual was unprecedented.