Journal of Late Antiquity

This special issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity includes all seven revised and peer-refereed papers presented at the one-day colloquium “Envisioning the Roman Emperor in Speech and Word in Late Antiquity.” This gathering, organized by Jan Willem Drijvers and Meaghan McEvoy and held at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) on 25 July 2018,¹ focused on the issue of how, in a period of change from the fourth to fifth century ce, a renewal of imperial leadership and ideology was initiated in order to recreate stable rule. It explored one of the principal ways in which this can be observed, through surviving spoken and written perspectives on late Roman rule. After the “crisis” of the third century, the Roman empire reinvented and revived itself thanks to the reforms of Diocletian and his Tetrarchic regime, as well as to the long, stable reign of Constantine. In this new Roman empire, emperorship and imperial ideology were reformulated, making use of the traditions of the past and introducing new elements. One of the key aims of the colloquium was to consider the processes by which imperial leadership was reshaped and framed in order to secure imperial rule once more after a period of crisis. Pivotal to the colloquium was the question of how texts and speeches about emperors and their families in the late Roman period functioned in communicating imperial rule and ideology.

The processes of political negotiation between a sovereign and his subjects are structured by symbols, rituals, and narratives. In the early Roman empire, speech-making was a useful medium of communication between an emperor and his people (and vice versa), and at the same time an important vehicle for [End Page 2] advocating and negotiating imperial ideology. This was even more the case in Late Antiquity: epideictic oratory—that is, praise-and-blame rhetoric— became crucial in the context of anchoring imperial rule in Late Antiquity, but invectives and funeral orations were likewise important texts for broadcasting imperial ideological concepts.

In addition to coinage, laws, and other imperial communications, panegyrics—that is, speeches of praise given in honor of an imperial person— were significant communicative statements about authority and power, serving as effective media for expressing, producing, and sustaining imperial ideology, and being as well an efficient means for broadcasting imperial representation.² Of all the speeches delivered in the Roman imperial period, only a small proportion have been passed down to us. However, considerably more speeches (both in Latin and Greek) have been preserved from the late Roman empire than from the early empire. In fact, in the late Roman empire, when the emperor no longer presented himself as princeps but rather as dominus, rhetoric may have become an even more important mode of communication in the context of imperial rule. Among those texts that survive, speeches in honor of emperors dominate, but a small number of speeches honoring imperial women as well as speeches delivered to imperial officials are also extant.

By the end of the third century, panegyrics had become one of the most significant forms of communication between a ruler and his subjects—indeed, they are the predominant form of public oration relating to emperors in the late Roman period and are the focus of more than half of the articles collected in this special issue. More than sixty panegyrics, most of them in prose, survive for the years between 289 and the early fifth century.³ This is a considerable number, yet only the tip of the iceberg; many more speeches must have been composed and delivered on a variety of occasions such as an imperial adventus, the emperor’s dies imperii, a notable victory, the assumption of the consulship, or an imperial marriage.

Apart from panegyrics, invectives—that is, derogatory orations in which the emperor is criticized—seem to have become fashionable in the late Roman empire. Synesius’s De regno, written in response to his failure to gain an audience at the court as ambassador of his city with the emperor Arcadius (reigned from 395 to 408), is well known. Synesius vents his irritation by reporting what is wrong with Arcadius’s reign while...