Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Adrastos Omissi - Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire_ Civil War, Panegyric, and the Construction of Legitimacy-Oxford University Press (2018).
369 pages
Preface
sine ira et studio Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people—in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly. I did not question the prevailing standards, because so far as I could see there were no others. How could the rich, the strong, the elegant, the fashionable, the powerful, be in the wrong? It was their world, and the rules they made for it must be the right ones. George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’¹ This book was born of a simple observation, that very little had been written on the history of usurpation in the later Roman Empire. It seemed to me strange that, in an age so dominated by civil war, historians had not seen fit to subject usurpation to detailed scrutiny.
The obvious thing to do, therefore, seemed to be to write the absent book myself. In its conception, it was a monograph upon civil war and usurpation from the end of the crisis of the third century to the fall of the Empire in the West and the emergence of the new, Constantinopolitan Empire in the East. The book was to consider why usurpations occurred, how they were undertaken, and in what ways they played themselves out. Above all, it was to shine some much-needed light upon the shadowy regimes of the late Empire’s great usurpers, men like Carausius, Maxentius, Magnentius, Magnus Maximus, and Constantine III. As is often the case at the beginning of a new project, perhaps the first lesson that my research had to teach was that there was a very good reason that this book had not already been written. Historians, whatever their subject and period, are at the mercy of their sources.
Although we can approach them creatively or innovatively, reimagine them or augment them with new discoveries, we can ultimately only see our periods through the prism of their sources. And in this instance the sources clung jealously to their secrets. Usurpers are elusive figures, their biographies usually no more than a few clipped phrases, their policies unknown, their adherents anonymous but for the occasional name that falls accidentally, like loose change, from this or that source. What I might build from the sum of these disjointed parts, I began to see, would be a Frankenstein’s monster which might bear the semblance of a connected historical account but would in fact be little more than a series of rumours and invectives strung together in order. This tight-lipped refusal of the sources to yield the details I desired of them pushed me to new questions. Why was it (other, perhaps, than naive expectations) that I was unable to find the details that I was searching for? What processes had served to destroy them? Perhaps most importantly of all, what might I learn from looking at the sources not with an eye for what they could tell me, but for what it was their authors were trying not to tell me? Not only is the book richer because of this shift in attitude, but the process has also been a personally transformative one, and helped to move me from the comforting but immature position of one who views the past as an independent reality, accessed more or less directly through sources more or less thickly populated with facts, to that of one who understands, at least vaguely, that the past is text.
The hope to find a past independent of the text is as vain as the hope to find a thought independent of a thinker. Tacitus, at the opening of his Annales, made a profession of that virtue which all ambitious historians claim and which all sensible historians know to be an impossibility, to report the past sine ira et studio, without bitterness and without partiality. Yet to view the world— through text, through monuments, or even through the windows of the eyes and the ears—is to view it studio: with partiality, with intention, with agenda. There is no history without partiality. The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter I provides the reader with some context by way of an account of the history of imperial power between its inception and the outbreak of the third-century crisis. It attempts to provide some explanation for the deeply chaotic nature of the imperial succession and the near imponderability of such questions as ‘what is usurpation?’ Chapter II is perhaps the most important chapter in the whole work, a justification of the value of the project and—I hope—a convincing demonstration not only of how we can use panegyric to understand civil war but also of the fact that panegyric constituted one of the most important primary sources available to Roman historians and that, therefore, panegyric underpins all primary material relating to imperial history that we possess from the period.
Chapters III–IX then set about the body of the project, examining how the panegyrics present individual usurpations and working chronologically through the span of the period as defined by the textual corpus of the surviving prose panegyrics. Each chapter attempts to describe how the panegyrics of the period constructed the narrative of inter-imperial conflict, to use those narratives to understand the behaviour of the emperors and courts that they praised, and to demonstrate the way in which the panegyrics have shaped subsequent historical source material. Chapter X then provides something of a postscript, examining from a historical rather than a textual point of view why it is that the book has the upper chronological boundary (the death of Theodosius) that it has and offering some very general remarks on how the office of emperor changed in both East and West during the fifth century. I conclude, as one ought, by telling my reader the things they ought to think after having read the preceding pages, in case I have failed to make them think them.
This book is not, in and of itself, either a history of usurpation or a political history of the period in question. It assumes a certain familiarity with late Roman history and as such—lamentably—will constitute a poor introduction to the topic. Nevertheless, I hope that it will be of use to students as well as to researchers and I have made an effort to make it as accessible as the material allows. In particular, I have tried to make sure that quotations from original sources and from modern scholarship in languages other than English are provided in translation (at least when quoted in the main text) and that technical terms in Latin and Greek have been translated or glossed. The debts of gratitude that I have accrued in the long course of this work, which began life as a doctoral project undertaken in 2009 at St John’s College, Oxford, are too many to comprehensively acknowledge, though certain names cannot go unmentioned. Thanks first is owed to my doctoral supervisor, Neil McLynn, who helped above all to redirect an obsession with swords, horses, and armour into an attempt to write history. Neil’s guidance helped to bring this project to life and without him it would not exist in any recognizable form. I am also deeply indebted to the patient teachers who took a monoglot Masters’ student and gave him the tools to work with his sources, in particular to Mary Whitby, to Juliane Kerkhecker, and to Ida Toth.
To Ida I also owe a great debt for the confidence she has placed in me as a teacher over the years, and the opportunities that this trust has afforded me. I would also like to express my gratitude to those kind friends who have read drafts of parts or all of this work, and whose comments have greatly enriched it, in particular to Lydia Matthews, Alan Ross, Michael Hanaghan, and to my brother, Cesare Omissi, who pored over the whole manuscript with a humbling diligence. Many are the gaffes and blunders from which they all have saved me, and such as remain are solely my responsibility. My thanks also to Enrico Emanuele Prodi, who helped to make up for rare failings in the Bodleian Library.
To Oriel College, Oxford, I also owe a great debt of thanks for having provided me with a Junior Research Fellowship from 2014–17, during which years the writing of this book was undertaken. Finally, it must be stressed that none of this work would have been possible without generous funding from the States of Jersey, from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and from the British Academy, all of whom have, at various stages, awarded me grants that have thereby made it possible for me to devote myself to study and research. Preface ix My thanks goes also to various seminar series and conferences at which I have been able to air some of the ideas contained within the book and to receive feedback from peers and senior colleagues; in particular: the Institute of Classical Studies Graduate WIP seminar in London, the Oxford University Byzantine Society Graduate Conference 2012 and 2013, the conference ‘Use of Antiquity’, held in Vienna in 2012, the History Research Seminar at Hull, the Late Roman and the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies research seminars at Oxford, the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2013 and 2015, the conference ‘Medial (re)presentations’. held in Göttingen in February 2015, and to the 9th biennial Celtic Conference in Classics, held in Dublin in 2016.
Similarly, I am deeply indebted to the board of OUP’s ‘Oxford Studies in Byzantium’ series for taking this work on, in particular to Elizabeth Jeffreys, who was a champion of this book when it needed one, and to James HowardJohnston, as mild-tempered and supportive an editor as one could hope to work with. I would also like to thank the team at OUP—in particular Charlotte Loveridge, Georgina Leighton—and my copy editor, Ben Harris, whose diligence and helpfulness made the business of preparing the manuscript an easy and a pleasant one. I must also offer my thanks to Mark Humphries and to Mark Whittow, who examined the DPhil thesis on which this work was based and whose encouragement and support gave me the confidence to believe that it might make a book worth reading. Both have since proven great mentors, and have made the baffling road of academic life an easier one to tread.
It is with a heavy heart, and still with a sense of disbelief, that I must add to these thanks the tragic coda that Mark Whittow will never be able to read them. I owed to Mark and impossible debt of gratitude for his help over the years, for the belief he always seemed to place in me, and for his infectious energy and positivity. I shall miss him dearly. Finally, for their love, support, and, above all, patience, I want to say thank you to my family, to Chloé, to Leo, to Milo, and to Rafe. Without you all busily working away at giving me a life filled with love and fun and little daily adventures, there is no way that I would have ever had the heart to finish this project. Like it or not, this book is dedicated to you.
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