Civiles Principes and Persian Despots: Alexander Severus’ Admission Ritual in the Historia Augusta

Chapter Three examines the pitiful exempla of imperial women, as they are depicted by John Chrysostom in his Letter to a Young Widow. Chrysostom’s letter relates the various unhappy fates of fourth-century imperial women and the sorry lot of those who survived the various regime changes. In doing so, the letter offers a microcosm of the assumptions with which imperial women were defined in the fourth and fifth centuries and highlights what function they served in the negotiation of political hierarchies. The chapter looks at how the women are presented in the letter and what a broader consideration of their experiences can tell us of their place in fourth-century politics. It then establishes how representative the fates of the imperial women mentioned in the letter were of imperial women at moments of regime change. By establishing how typical this was, broader comments on the wider changes that were taking place in the imperial system in the fourth century can be made and how this affected the lives of the women associated with the emperors. Through analysis of the letter itself and consideration of it in the broader shifting context of the imperial court, and Chrysostom’s own career, the chapter aims to distil the evolution of the roles of imperial women over the course of the long fourth century through the prism of regime changes.

This chapter surveys Hesiodic reception in fourth-century bce prose, with emphasis on Plato and especially the Laws. Passages of the Laws are read in context and used to illuminate the status of Hesiodic poetry in the fourth century. Topics discussed include rhapsodic performance, Hesiod’s relationship to Homer, study of Hesiodic poetry in schools, the fourth-century manuscript tradition, citation of Hesiod’s poems in conversation and Athenian courtrooms, and the politics of Hesiodic quotation. Whether understood as part of the rhapsode’s canon, a gnomic poet, a proto-sophist or proto-philosopher, or an allegorist, Hesiod remained a dynamic site for the production of the philosophical, literary, and political debates that animated fourth-century prose.

Facing the Challenges of Reconstructing Ancient Buildings

For generations the debate has continued: can politicians, or mid-level administrators, speak freely and say what they think, or must they describe their superiors in purely flattering ways and abandon any philosophy of independent thought? The politician and philosopher Themistius faced these same issues in the later fourth century, in composing and delivering his panegyrics for several Roman emperors. John Vanderspoel examines the relationship between Themistius and the emperors whom he served, and assesses realistically how philosopher and emperor interacted. Themistius' speeches cover a range of periods and topics, and offer an important body of evidence for governmental affairs in the later fourth century. Themistius and the Imperial Court includes chapters on Themistius himself, as well as on his relations with the emperors Constantius, Julian, Jovian, Valens, and Theodosius. Appendices discuss Themistius' philosophical works and extant speeches, present translations of selected sections of his Orations, and offer a chronology of Themistius' speeches, among other topics. Themistius and the Imperial Court will be of interest to ancient historians, classicists, students and scholars of the ancient Near East, and all those interested in power politics within governing classes. John Vanderspoel is Associate Professor of Ancient History, University of Calgary. He has written numerous articles and reviews on late antiquity.

It is often assumed that the political fortunes of the city of Rome and of its élite, the Senate, decline in late antiquity. Such decline is attributed to emperors residing in other centers closer to the frontiers and to the inflation of senatorial status in the fourth century. This article argues, however, that the senators of Rome continued to see themselves as important participants in imperial high politics throughout the period. Such ambitions were ably demonstrated by Q. Aurelius Symmachus, whose role as senatorial ambassador to the imperial court was predicated on the basis that the Senate in Rome was still an important political institution. Similar ambitions motivated Roman senators to give active support to rival sides in political usurpations in the fourth century; this activity was advertised, moreover, by an impressive series of dedications set up in the Forum Romanum in close proximity to the Senate House itself. The climax of these aspirations came in the unstable circumstances of the fifth century when, for the first time in over a hundred years, Roman senators seated themselves on the imperial throne. Far from being a moribund political anachronism, then, the Senate in Rome continued to act as a major partner in the running of the Empire throughout the last centuries of Roman rule in the West.

Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat

This study examines variability in size, staple crop production, and wealth among households in the community of K'axob, Belize, from the ninth century B.C. until the ninth century A.D. Staple crop consumption and production are reconstructed from stable bone isotopes of 25 adults from 21 households. The formation of larger corporate households is documented from the spatial layout of 62 residences. Wealth differentiation is reconstructed by comparing architectural and ritual elements from 69 households. The formation of larger corporate households, the diversification of staple crop production, and the emergence of interhousehold wealth differentiation beginning in the fourth century B.C. coincided with the emergence of regional elites. However, changes in household size and staple crop production should be understood in terms of the high degree of continuity in the local agrarian economy. These findings suggest that elite political strategies had repercussions for the ways farming households managed staple crop production but that elites did not directly control production. The study also expands on current models of complex society that question the degree to which political elites directly managed the agrarian economy.

During or just after the reign of Rome's first emperor Augustus (r. 27 b.c.e. –14 c.e. ), the Greek geographer Strabo penned his work Geographica and provided a valuable description of many of the peoples and places in the Greco-Roman world. When Strabo reported the “best accredited story of the founding of Rome,” he recounted the tale, “partly fabulous but partly closer to the truth,” of Rhea Silvia, a woman forced by her uncle Amulius to become a Vestal Virgin to assure she would remain childless, thereby preventing the birth of a potential political rival. Notwithstanding her sacred inviolability, Rhea Silvia was impregnated by the god Mars. She gave birth to Romulus and Remus, semidivine twin boys who grew into manhood, defeated Amulius and his sons, and established the foundations for the city of Rome. Lacking natural defenses and usable arable land, the location for Rome's foundation was suitable “more as a matter of necessity than of choice.” For his part, Strabo forgave the early Romans for not beautifying their city, citing their understandable preoccupation with matters of government and war. The successors to Rome's mythical founders would eventually reduce its vulnerability by building protective circuit walls and defensive gates as early as the fourth century b.c.e . By the reign of Augustus, however, Strabo noted that circumstances had indeed changed. Rome's leaders of the late republic and the first imperial court had not neglected the city's infrastructure; rather they filled Rome with “many beautiful structures.” In fact, Pompey, the Deified Caesar, Augustus, his sons and friends, and wife and sister, have outdone all others in their zeal for buildings and in the expense incurred. The Campus Martius contains most of these, and thus, in addition to its natural beauty, it has received still further adornment as a result of foresight.

Constantine, the Roman Emperor from 312-337, was a law-giver who first put the Christian Church in the place of primacy in the organization of the state that it only lost as recently as the seventeenth century; as such, he is very important to legal and social history in the Western experience. This thesis explores the degree to which the Emperor Constantine’s adoption and adaptation of the Christian religion’s bureaucratic structure affected the social and legal order of the Roman state bureaucracy in the fourth century: I do this by examining both the question of his legislation pertaining to making bishops judges and the legal nature of his relationship with the bishops which developed as they appealed their own decisions to his imperial court, specifically in both the Donatist and Arian crises. Constantine’s two pieces of legislation that most directly bear on this question come from 318 and 333: Codex Theodosianus (CTh) 1.27.1 and Sirmondian Constitution (Sirm.) 1, respectively. In the first, an edict, Constantine allows that any litigant may have their case transferred to a bishop’s court if they so choose, but he is careful to emphasize the right of the presiding judge to make this transfer official. In the second, a rescript, Constantine significantly expands the powers of the bishop’s as judges, and indicates that, among other things, just as with decision of the praetorian prefects, any decision of a bishop is not subject to appeal. In this way, the bishop’s court seemed to be positioned by Constantine as an appeal court of kinds, but in practice and according to the small amount of evidence we have on the subject, these courts, the episcopalis audentia, heard most legal matters as a working court of first instance, like that of any other local magistrate. The uniqueness of the court is evident not so much in their powers as judges, but in the fact that they began to hear matters between litigants applying Roman law to enforce their rights. The focus of my research is the seeming expansion of powers that Constantine gives to the bishops from the first to the second piece of legislation. The 333 rescript was actually a reply to the Prefect of Rome, Ablavius, who was questioning the use of the Edict of 318, and because of this, perhaps, we learn a great deal more about what Constantine wanted that earlier law to mean in 333, but whether he initially had this in mind is unknown since the first piece of legislation was very brief. I argue that he did not have this in mind, and that only after his relationship with the bishops grew in the intervening years, highlighted jointly by his blatant adoption of the Christian religion and subsequently assuming state responsibility for their protection and dispute settlement mechanism at the Council of Nicaea in 325, would such expansion of judicial authority make any reasonable sense. The emperor was in some ways compelled into a relationship with the Church because of the internecine conflicts within it which threatened the stability of his Empire, the two most important being the Donatist and Arian crises.

Although it is normal, and indeed profoundly necessary, to break up the historical past into periods that can be studied in a more or less manageable way, many topics are illuminated by deliberately ignoring traditional historiographical boundaries, opening up a broader comparative analysis by considering them across a wider span of time. Roman imperial history is certainly one such example, not least because the habit of imposing a sharp divide between early and later empires at the accession of Diocletian is so deeply ingrained. One need only scan a few representative titles on a bookshelf to see how pervasive the division is. Yet even a moment’s casual reflection will reveal how many continuities between second and fourth centuries the traditional periodization tends to obscure. In the same way that there is a pressing need to examine the fifth-century West within its narrower context, in order to minimize the distorting effects of past historiography, so too should we examine the fourth-century empire in the perspective of the “longue durée.”

Reviewed by: Four Byzantine Novels by Elizabeth Jeffreys Steven Moore (bio) Elizabeth Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels. Translated with Introductions and Notes by Jeffreys. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012 (Distributed in the US by the U of Chicago P). 488pp. $120, cloth. For the Greekless reader, this long-awaited anthology provides an important link between the ancient Greek novel and the novels we read today. The Greeks created what we now call novels at the beginning of the Common Era, peaking in the fourth century with the greatest of them, Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story. Eight complete novels survive, along with fragments from a dozen or so others, all conveniently gathered in B. P. Reardon’s Collected Ancient Greek Novels (University of California Press, 1989). When the best of them were rediscovered and translated during the Renaissance, they provided the template for the European novel of the early-modern period, as Margret Doody has demonstrated in The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers University Press, 1996). However, few readers are aware that in twelfth-century Byzantium, a handful of writers revived the ancient Greek novel and put their own spin on the genre. What is most striking is how modern, even postmodern, these medieval novels sound. Like Barth and Pynchon imitating the eighteenth-century novel in The Sot-Weed Factor and Mason & Dixon, respectively, the Byzantines set their novels in the past and artificially imitated the Greek of antiquity rather than their own vernacular, all while having some metafictional fun with older forms of fiction and diction. Jeffreys translates and annotates the four that have survived (as in the case with ancient Greek novels, more were undoubtedly written but have disappeared.) The earliest, a novel in verse entitled Rhodanthe and Dosikles, was composed probably in the early 1130s by Theodore Prodromos. [End Page 237] Like Nabokov in Laughter in the Dark, he tells us upfront what his novel will be about, a rehash of the standard topoi of earlier Greek novels: These [are the adventures] of the silvery girl Rhodanthe with the lovely garland and of the valiant and comely youth Dosikles, the flights and wanderings and tempests and billows, brigands, grievous eddies, sorrows that give rise to love, chains and indissoluble fetters and imprisonments in gloomy dungeons, grim sacrifices, bitter grief, poisoned cups and paralysis of joints, and then marriage and the marriage bed and passionate love. (20) Structurally and thematically similar to Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Rhodanthe and Dosikles is essentially a vehicle for various rhetorical set pieces, an opportunity for Prodromos to show off his skill and knowledge and occasionally to make fun of the conventions of the genre. (These novels were read aloud at the imperial court and in the literary salons of Constantinople; they were literally performance pieces. Like ballets, they do not so much tell a story as perform one.) Although nowhere near as complex and ingenious as Heliodorus, Prodromos manages to say some interesting things about dream psychology, military theory, and statecraft while performing elegant variations on the ancient theme of ideal lovers who elope, are separated and suffer various setbacks, and are eventually reunited and married. Narrower in scope but much sexier, Hysmine and Hysminias was written in prose during the 1140s or ’50s and is attributed to Eumathios Makrembolites. Modeled on the second-best of the ancient Greek novels, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (late second century), this one is the first-person account of how a young herald named Hysminias met and fell in love with a remarkably forward young woman named Hysmine. Struck by the similarity between their names, and delegated to the ceremony of washing his feet, Hysmine goes for it: The maiden Hysmine, crouching down by my feet and talking hold of them, washes them in the water (this is an honour accorded to heralds); she holds them, she clasps them, she embraces them, she presses them, she kisses them silently and sneaks a kiss; eventually she scratches me with her fingernails and tickles me. (183) [End Page 238] Not surprisingly, Hysminias has an erotic dream that night about her, the first of many in this R-rated novel. Though they engage in some heavy petting, both agree to save...

The fourth definition of the term ‘canon’ in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is as follows: ‘The list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired’. Like many dictionary definitions it gives rise to more questions than it answers, for the term ‘the Christian Church’ is complex and itself notoriously difficult to define, especially in the early years of the Christian era. The Church could be defined, at least after the fourth century, as that community which accepts the canonical Scriptures, while they in turn are defined as the authoritative books ‘canonical’ accepted by the Church - a circular argument. Furthermore, how do we understand ‘genuine’? What is meant in this definition by the term ‘inspired’? One thing is clear, however. The term ‘canon’ as it is used variously in the pages which follow is, in the first instance, a theological one, deriving from the first dictionary definition of the word: ‘A rule, law or decree of the Church; esp. A rule laid down by an eccl. Council’. For the shape of the canon of the Bible was eventually established by political debates and decisions within the Church, whatever may have been the origins, heavenly or earthly, of its individually ‘inspired’ books, and there has always remained a degree of instability in both its acceptance and precise limits.

Compared to its first-to-third century antecedents, the Roman imperial court of the fourth century exhibits markedly distinctive features; certain differences may be judged cosmetic, but others suggest a transformative shift in the court as a social and administrative institution. This discussion focuses on: the applicability to the Late Roman case of an influential generalizing theory of court formation and society, and the partial anticipation of modern "court studies" discourse by Gibbon; the altered social composition and expanded size of the court's personnel, the structural complexity of its bureaucratic apparatus, and their combined transformative effects; the role of purposeful reforms and innovations as drivers of long-term change; Ammianus' perceptions of the transformed court.

Jacoby's influential opinion that the Atthidographers were part of the political discourse of the fourth century has been the subject of revision in recent years. His critics have argued that the genre of Atthidography is primarily antiquarian and that to look for partisan political attitudes in the Atthides is a mistake. An examination of the work of Kleidemos, however, reveals a coherent presentation of the Athenian past designed to vindicate the democratic constitution and to demonstrate the close connection between the democracy and Athens' naval power. This emerges most clearly in Kleidemos's treatment of three important democratic heroes: Theseus, Kleisthenes, and Themistokles. By the fourth century, Theseus had already emerged as the most popular Athenian hero. His accomplishments were modeled in part on the deeds of Herakles and were recorded in vase painting and relief sculpture, and on the walls of the Stoa Poikile. Kleidemos presented a distinctive account of Theseus, emphasizing his role in founding the Athenian navy in preparation for the expedition to Krete. Kleidemos portrayed him as a leader capable of defending Athens and making peace with Athens' enemies, first the Kretans and later the Amazons. This is a king in the tradition of Euripides' Theseus in the Suppliants, the ruler of a free and democratic city. The connection between democratic leadership, Athenian might, and the naval power of Athens is also underscored in Kleidemos's handling of Kleisthenes. Again, the information provided by Kleidemos is distinctive, inasmuch as he reports that it was Kleisthenes who was responsible for the system of naukrariai, which he likens to the symmories of the fourth century. Unlike the version of the Ath. Pol., which imagines the Kleisthenic demes replacing the Solonian naukrariai, Kleidemos saw the demes and naukrariai as complementary divisions, the former organizing the state's resources for the upkeep of the navy, and the latter establishing the political basis for the democracy. Themistokles is also given unique treatment. Kleidemos records the anecdote according to which Themistokles was responsible for the Battle of Salamis because he found sufficient money to man the ships when the generals had run out of funds and had ordered the abandonment of the city. He used the disappearance of the gorgoneion of the statue of Athena as an excuse to ransack the baggage of the Athenians and collect enough wealth to pay the fleet. The story is as tendentious as the account in the Ath. Pol., which gives the credit to the Areopagos. Both versions demonstrate how Athens' past had become a battleground in the political debates of the mid-fourth century. Unlike the epitaphios logos with its emphasis on the eternal and unchanging glory of Athens, the "Atthis" of Kleidemos attempted to prove that the greatness of Athens rested historically on three foundations: the heroes of the democracy, the democratic constitution, and the navy.

The introduction defines several concepts that are used throughout the book. The religious dissidents in late Roman society were pagans and heretics. These terms are only shorthand: ‘pagans’ for non-Christians, and ‘heretics’ for deviant Christians. They are relational, meaning that there would have been no pagans without the viewpoint of Christians. Similarly, the question of who was a heretic depended on the perceiver. The period under scrutiny saw the Christianization of imperial and ecclesiastical discourses of control. Imperial power is understood as the emperors in both the East and the West, the imperial courts, and the administration. Ecclesiastical power refers to church leaders—mainly bishops, whose authority was increasing during the fourth and fifth centuries. There was no uniform church, and Christian congregations were miscellaneous assemblages of adherents.