The Emperor in the Byzantine World

Papers from the Forty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies

Shaun Tougher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429590467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The subject of the emperor in the Byzantine world may seem likely to be a well-studied topic but there is no book devoted to the emperor in general covering the span of the Byzantine empire. Of course there are studies on individual emperors, dynasties and aspects of the imperial office/role, but there remains no equivalent to Fergus Millar's The Emperor in the Roman World (from which the proposed volume takes inspiration for its title and scope). The oddity of a lack of a general study of the Byzantine emperor is compounded by the fact that a series of books devoted to Byzantine empresses was published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus it is appropriate to turn the spotlight on the emperor.

Themes covered by the contributions include: questions of dynasty and imperial families; the imperial court and the emperor's men; imperial duties and the emperor as ruler; imperial literature (the emperor as subject and author); and the material emperor, including imperial images and spaces.

The volume fills a need in the field and the market, and also brings new and cutting-edge approaches to the study of the Byzantine emperor. Although the volume cannot hope to be a comprehensive treatment of the emperor in the Byzantine world it aims to cover a broad chronological and thematic span and to play a vital part in setting the agenda for future work. The subject of the Byzantine emperor has also an obvious relevance for historians working on rulership in other cultures and periods.

Part I

DYNASTY

Imperial families

1

FAMILY, DYNASTY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF LEGITIMACY FROM AUGUSTUS TO THE THEODOSIANS¹

Mark Humphries

Introduction: The protest of Dagalaifus

Early 364 was an uncertain time for the Roman empire. The emperor Jovian had just died in unforeseen circumstances on 17 February after a reign of barely eight months. His predecessor, Julian, had died on the night of 26 June 363 having been fatally wounded in a skirmish with the Persians. Julian’s own reign had been short, his predecessor Constantius II having passed away on 3 November 361.² Amid the anxieties caused by this rapid sequence of imperial exits,³ a cabal of officers at Nicaea chose to elevate the Pannonian officer Valentinian to the throne at Nicaea (although at the time Valentinian himself was absent at Ancyra). When Valentinian arrived in person, a decision was made to postpone his elevation, lest it occur on the inauspicious bisextile day (24 February).⁴ Then, on the morning of 25 February, at a tribunal outside Nicaea, a show of an election took place to confirm Valentinian as emperor. This done, Valentinian prepared to address the assembled troops, but at that moment events threatened to turn ugly. The soldiers, clashing their shields, demanded that Valentinian appoint an imperial colleague: clearly, the recent sequence of imperial deaths – and particularly the sudden demise of Jovian just a week earlier – was playing on everyone’s mind, and they wanted some guarantee of continuity should their new emperor suddenly expire.⁵

Only Valentinian’s inspiring presence was able to forestall an outbreak of violent unrest, but the question of an imperial colleague was not going to go away. It plainly dominated discussions between the emperor and his consistorium over the following days, during which time, it seems, Valentinian was clearly in favour of elevating his brother Valens.⁶ We are told by Ammianus Marcellinus of one discussion in which the comes domesticorum Dagalaifus counselled the emperor: ‘If you love your relatives, most excellent emperor, you have a brother – but if you love the state, you should invest somebody else.’⁷ Valentinian apparently reacted with barely suppressed rage, but he remained determined to have his brother as co-emperor: he immediately promoted him to the position of tribunus stabuli; later, on 28 March, at the Hebdomon outside Constantinople, he formally invested Valens as co-ruler.

The bold argument made by Dagalaifus, and the simmering anger it induced in Valentinian, are instructive in various ways about the dynamics of Roman imperial succession. On the one hand, the events of early spring 364 suggest that when it came to the appointment of co-emperors, and therefore of potential successors, familial relationship was a major consideration. On the other hand, it shows that what might be called a dynastic principle could be contested. While the words ascribed to Dagalaifus may not, of course, be genuine, they became celebrated mots justes, and were reiterated by the Byzantine historians Leo the Grammarian and Cedrenus in their accounts of these events.⁸ But whatever their historicity, Dagalaifus’ comments reflect a tension in thinking about who made the best imperial colleague and potential successor, and the role in such choices of family and dynastic connections.

This chapter will explore the consequences of this debate about dynastic legitimacy for imperial successions between the first century and the fifth.⁹ It will begin by examining 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. The second half of my discussion will trace developments into late antiquity, showing how emperors sought to affirm their legitimacy through the creation of dynasties: these could be both authentically biological and artificially constructed, either through adoption or through some other form of association, sometimes asserted retrospectively. As we will see, there was often no clear distinction between bloodline and constructed dynasties, and espousals of dynastic legitimacy often combined elements of both. If that sounds a somewhat messy reality, then it needs to be recalled furthermore that an emperor’s legitimacy depended on more than just the blood that coursed through his veins: other achievements in the military, administrative, and religious spheres were important too, as was the opinion of the different sections of imperial society (such as nobles, the Roman people, soldiers, and provincials) who acquiesced in an emperor’s rule.¹⁰ In other words, it was not just enough for an emperor to receive appointment; his legitimacy had to be accepted by others, so that proclamations of legitimacy were often made in contexts in which they could be contested, not least by credible rivals for the throne. Amid this complex nexus of considerations, I will argue that the fourth century saw renewed emphasis on dynastic succession, likely in response to the upheavals of the third century, and the reverberations of this reassertion of dynasticism were to be felt in later, Byzantine centuries.¹¹

Dynasty, office, and succession from Augustus to the Severans

In the epilogue of his magisterial examination of the role of the emperor in the Roman world, Fergus Millar remarked upon the essential difficulties of defining the imperial office.¹² 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.¹³ Similarly, it is clear that the emperor was quite unlike even the most powerful commanders under the late Republic, who had been hide-bound by constitutional proprieties: the emperor, in spite of all protests to the contrary in texts like Augustus’ Res Gestae or Pliny’s Panegyricus on Trajan, was not.¹⁴ This had significant ramifications for issues of the succession and the legitimacy of any successor. At one level, it was not immediately clear how a personal position carved out by Octavian-Augustus in the last stages of the civil wars, and consolidated by grants to him of extraordinary magisterial power from the senate and people, could be passed on intact to any successor.¹⁵ Yet this direct transference was precisely what Augustus sought to achieve, by investing a string of potential successors, from Marcellus onwards, with a concentration of magistracies based on his own.¹⁶ Some titles came to have specific connotations for designating heirs, such as princeps iuventutis, first accorded to Augustus’ grandsons Gaius and Lucius, and subsequently used by emperors down to the Severan dynasty to mark out potential successors.¹⁷

At another level, such magistracies were not deemed adequate in themselves to mark out a successor: from the outset, arrangements of kinship and familial adoption were deployed to stress a close personal link between these individuals and Augustus himself. His nephew Marcellus, his grandsons Gaius and Lucius, and his stepson Tiberius were all adopted as his sons, while such connections were made stronger by marrying his daughter Julia successively to Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, and Tiberius. In that sense, this desire for a close family connection resembled the ad hoc arrange...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Spelling of Names
• Introduction
• Part I Dynasty: Imperial Families
• Part II the Emperor’s Men: Court and Empire
• Part III the Emperor as Ruler: Duties and Ideals
• Part IV Imperial Literature: Emperor as Subject and Author
• Part V the Material Emperor: Image, Space and Empire
• Index