Adrastos Omissi

One of the great maxims of history is that it is written by the victors, and nowhere does this find greater support than in the later Roman Empire. Between 284 and 395 AD, no fewer than 37 men claimed imperial power, though today we recognize barely half of these men as 'legitimate' rulers and more than two thirds died at their subjects' hands. Once established in power, a new ruler needed to publicly legitimate himself and to discredit his predecessor: overt criticism of the new regime became high treason, with historians supressing their accounts for fear of reprisals and the very names of defeated emperors chiselled from public inscriptions and deleted from official records. In a period of such chaos, how can we ever hope to record in any fair or objective way the history of the Roman state?

Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire is the first history of civil war in the later Roman Empire to be written in English and aims to address this question by focusing on the various ways in which successive imperial dynasties attempted to legitimate themselves and to counter the threat of almost perpetual internal challenge to their rule. Panegyric in particular emerges as a crucial tool for understanding the rapidly changing political world of the third and fourth centuries, providing direct evidence of how, in the wake of civil wars, emperors attempted to publish their legitimacy and to delegitimize their enemies. The ceremony and oratory surrounding imperial courts too was of great significance: used aggressively to dramatize and constantly recall the events of recent civil wars, the narratives produced by the court in this context also went on to have enormous influence on the messages and narratives found within contemporary historical texts. In its exploration of the ways in which successive imperial courts sought to communicate with their subjects, this volume offers a thoroughly original reworking of late Roman domestic politics, and demonstrates not only how history could be erased, rewritten, and repurposed, but also how civil war, and indeed usurpation, became endemic to the later Empire.


CONTENTS:
Frontmatter
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Typographical Note
PART I
I: Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire
I.1: Why usurpation?: the problem of the imperial succession
I.2: 'This litany of manifest usurpers and rebellious generals': why had the imperial succession become so unstable by the third century?
I.3: 'The difference between a tyrant and a king is one of deeds, not of name': how was usurpation understood in the late Roman Empire?
I.4: 'Let these things go unspoken': usurpation and modern research
II: Usurpation, Legitimacy, and Panegyric
II.1: Known unknowns, and unknown unknowns: how to use panegyric as a source
II.2: 'In which I would tell many lies': who dictated the content of panegyric?
II.3: 'And would be viewed with favour by those who knew them to be such': panegyric, audience, and influence
II.4: Propaganda and power
PART II
III: A House Divided Against Itself
IV: 'At last Roman, at last restored to the true light of Empire': Dyarchy, Tetrarchy, and the Fall of the British Empire of Carausius
IV.1: Birthing the late Roman state: dyarchs, tetrarchs, and a new language of power
IV.2: Emperors and bandits: the British Empire under Carausius and Allectus
V: Tyranny and Betrayal: Constantine, Maximian, Maxentius, and Licinius
V.1: Constantine's usurpation: Constantine, Galerius, and Maximian
V.2: The tyrannus: Maxentius and the rewards of civil war
V.3: Notable by his absence: Licinius and the rise of the Constantinian dynasty
VI: Tyranny and Blood: Constantius, Constans, Magnentius, and Vetranio
VI.1: Smiling for the cameras: the sons of Constantine, 337-50
VI.2: The son of the father: Constantius the tyrant-slayer
VII: Usurper, Propaganda, History: The Emperor Julian
VII.1: The voice of a usurper: Julian's rise to power
VII.2: Bleaching the stains: Julian's sole rule
VIII: Panegyric and Apology: The Accession of Jovian and the Usurpation of Procopius
VIII.1: The need for victory: Jovian and the demands of imperial rhetoric
VIII.2: The enemy inside: Valentinian, Valens, and Procopius
VIII.3: 'He who sought rule for himself behind the cloak of a little boy': the usurpation of Valentinian II
IX: Dismembering the House of Valentinian: The Usurpation of Theodosius and the War with Magnus Maximus
IX.1: 'And nobly he made the vote his own': the usurpation of Theodosius
IX.2: Divided loyalties: the usurpation of Magnus Maximus
X: Crisis and Transformation: Imperial Power in the Fifth Century
XI: Conclusion: Those Made Tyrants by the Victory of Others
Appendix I: The Panegyrics
Appendix II: Quantifying Usurpation: Notes to Accompany Figure I.2
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index

This article is an attempt to reconcile seemingly contradictory ancient evidence concerning the date and circumstances of Constantine’s departure from the court of Galerius to join his father, Constantius I. Modern consensus places this departure in mid-305 on the strength, above all, of evidence derived from Pan. Lat. VI.7.5-8.2, which states that Constantine joined his father in Gaul, and a military diploma unearthed in Italy in 1958, which lists Constantius as Britannicus Maximus II. This article deconstructs the case for this new chronology on four grounds. Firstly, it is argued that there is a prima facie plausibility to the fourth century narrative of Constantine’s hostage status with Galerius, who had worked hard to keep the sons of Maximian and Constantius from power. Secondly, the 306 diploma is subjected to scrutiny, and arguments offered for rejecting the iteration Britannicus Maximus II, not least that such other evidence of victory titles as exists contradicts it. Thirdly, a historical argument is made, on the basis of Pan. Lat. VII and VI, that no major victory was ever won by Constantius in northern Britain. Fourthly and finally, arguments are provided to explain why the panegyrics of Constantine’s early reign make no mention of his flight from Galerius. In all, it is argued that the story of Constantine’s flight should be treated as historical and dated to the summer of 306.

This article presents, for the first time in English, a translation of the two letters of the usurping emperor Magnus Maximus that are to be found within the Collectio Avellana (letters 39 and 40). The letters—from Maximus to the Emperor Valentinian II and from Maximus to Siricius, bishop of Rome—are each introduced with an extensive discussion of their subject matter, the circumstances of their composition, and their probable date. The article then considers possible reasons for these letters’ unusual survival; as letters of a usurping emperor, one would have expected them to be destroyed, and the article explores how we may understand their inclusion in the Collectio Avellana. Finally, the translations are given, with extensive commentary in their notes.

This chapter examines how imperial panegyric was used as a mechanism for the delivery of the propaganda messages of the imperial court to civilian and military elites within imperial and provincial cities. For the autocratic and often highly coercive governments of the fourth century, panegyric offered a way that centrally composed messages could be communicated by supposedly independent philosophers and teachers, giving these messages the aura of spontaneous praise for the ruler.

The chapter begins by consideration of the occasions on which panegyric was delivered, demonstrating that literally thousands of speeches must have been given during the fourth century. It then considers the surviving corpus of imperial panegyrics, 48 speeches from between 10 and 16 authors, spanning the period 289-389. The chapter then discusses the typical content of the speeches and examines how they were composed, how they related to central propaganda messages, and how the speeches communicated these messages to an incredibly wide audience, both through their immediate delivery and then, subsequently, through informal channels of communication.

Panegyrics often contained laughable falsehoods, and this has led to their being dismissed as sources without relevance. This chapter, however, attempts to reorient our understanding of the role that panegyrics played and to demonstrate that part of their virtue lay in their absurd falsities; the emperor displayed his power over his subjects by making them complicit in his self-presentation, forcing them to listen to (and to speak) words that they knew were false but were unable to contradict. The chapter also argues that the panegyrics were not solely the expression of the emperor’s power over his provincials, but were also a real opportunity for the provincials to communicate their needs to their ruler.

The chapter concludes with a consideration of the usurpation of Procopius (365-6), described in a panegyric delivered by Themistius to Valens (Or. VII), a panegyric delivered by Symmachus to Valentinian (Or. I), and the historical account of Ammianus. Using the very different portrayals of the rebellion in Symmachus and Themistius, the chapter illustrates how local elites were co-opted into the business of the court’s self-presentation, and how they took advantage of this to access imperial favour and patronage.

Damnatio memoriae, the ill-defined group of processes that we often now refer to by the term ‘memory sanctions’, is generally thought of in wholly negative terms. It is imagined as a process of destruction, of erasure, and of silence. Yet these complex assaults on the memory of fallen enemies were far more than simply destructive processes. Through the example of Magnus Maximus (383–8) and his commemoration in Rome and Constantinople during the reign of Theodosius I, this article considers how memory sanctions could be generative of historical material and how emperors used oratory, ceremony and triumphal architecture to
memorialise their fallen enemies.

The commonest psychedelic mushroom growing naturally in Britain, psilocybe semilanceata, is known in English as the Liberty Cap. This name, which references an ancient Roman social practice, has caused considerable speculation in modern literature. This article provides a conclusive etymology for how a modern drug acquired this seemingly obscure name.

In the late Roman world, a world of intense competition between absolute monarchs, emperors often found themselves passing a sentence of death over other emperors, whether former colleagues or career enemies.  Those who claimed imperial power and were killed for it were remembered by posterity as tyranni.  They were subjected to processes of memory sanction – their statues were defaced, their laws annulled, their appointments made null-and-void.  But perhaps the most immediate sanction imposed upon them, the first and most visible sign that they were a condemned noxius, was the mutilation of their body and its display in the public places of Rome and of the provincial capitals and cities.

In light of the surprising lack of scholarship on the question of the political significance of post mortem abuse of bodies in late antiquity, this paper explores this issue in relation to imperial usurpers, looking at how their bodies were treated after death, at the ceremonial and religious significance of mutilation rituals, at the audiences who viewed these rituals, and the settings in which they were carried out.  The paper begins, in 296, with the death of the British pretender Carausius, and ends in 416, with the triumph of Honorius, in Rome, over Priscus Attalus.

As someone who has lived out his entire academic career in a research environment augmented by digital resources, it can be easy to allow familiarity to breed contempt where the Internet is concerned. When I began my undergraduate degree in the autumn of 2005, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, as well as every faculty and college library, had already digitized their search functions, Wikipedia was approaching one million English articles, and all major journals were routinely publishing online (as well as busily uploading their back catalogues). Free and instantaneous access to a vast quantity of research material is, for those of my generation, simply assumed....

- See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2014/03/research-digital-age/#sthash.ssPOKReA.dpuf

This two-day conference (5th September – 6th September 2017), taking place in Trinity College,  Cambridge, will explore the changing concept of memory sanctions in late antiquity and the early middle ages (c. 200 AD – 800 AD). The process of memory sanction in the Roman world has been widely studied as damnatio memoriae (literally 'damnation of memory'), almost exclusively understood as a process of destroying and defacing images and of removing names from honorific inscriptions. By contrast, in the early middle ages the issue of memory sanctions and the destruction of images has been mainly studied through the history of Byzantine Iconoclasm, but there is no systematic study of memory sanctions in the post-Roman world, either in the east and in the west. This conference therefore aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars with different regional, chronological, and cultural focusses to bridge the gap between Roman and medieval practices of memory sanction. This will be achieved by charting out instances of conscious and intentional attempts, however conceived, to suppress memory between c. 200 AD – 800 AD.

Damnatio Memoriae: Memory Sanctions and Political Punishment in the late Roman World, 306-455

‘Let that time be reckoned as if it never was.’ So decreed the imperial brothers Arcadius and Honorius on 21st April 395, condemning the reign of their defeated imperial rival, Eugenius, whom their father had deposed. Their proclamation expressed a clear intent to bury Eugenius and all who had served him in silence, erasing them from history.

In the Roman period, enemies of the state were regularly subjected to ‘damnatio memoriae’ (literally ‘damnation of memory’). Statues were cast down, names erased from inscriptions, interdictions of silence created against naming certain people or recalling certain things. Yet the imposition of these sanctions against memory have never been studied by modern historians. In an age as fraught with political turmoil as the late Roman one, what use are our historical sources if we do not understand the processes of censorship or political repression that were imposed upon them? My project seeks to explore ‘damnatio memoriae’ and the role it has had in shaping history.