The Politics of Roman Memory: From the Fall of the Western Empire to the Age of Justinian (Empire and After) - Hardcover

Kruse, Marion

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251628 ISBN 13: 9780812251623

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

What did it mean to be Roman after the fall of the western Roman empire in 476, and what were the implications of new formulations of Roman identity for the inhabitants of both east and west? How could an empire be Roman when it was, in fact, at war with Rome? How did these issues motivate and shape historical constructions of Constantinople as the New Rome? And how did the idea that a Roman empire could fall influence political rhetoric in Constantinople? In The Politics of Roman Memory, Marion Kruse visits and revisits these questions to explore the process by which the emperors, historians, jurists, antiquarians, and poets of the eastern Roman empire employed both history and mythologized versions of the same to reimagine themselves not merely as Romans but as the only Romans worthy of the name.

The Politics of Roman Memory challenges conventional narratives of the transformation of the classical world, the supremacy of Christian identity in late antiquity, and the low literary merit of writers in this period. Kruse reconstructs a coherent intellectual movement in Constantinople that redefined Romanness in a Constantinopolitan idiom through the manipulation of Roman historical memory. Debates over the historical parameters of Romanness drew the attention of figures as diverse as Zosimos—long dismissed as a cranky pagan outlier, but here rehabilitated—and the emperor Justinian, as well as the major authors of Justinian's reign, such as Prokopios, Ioannes Lydos, and Jordanes. Finally, by examining the narratives embedded in Justinian's laws, Kruse demonstrates the importance of historical memory to the construction of imperial authority.

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Marion Kruse teaches classics at the University of Cincinnati.

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Introduction
Roman History After the Fall of RomeTherefore, most pious princeps, it befits your power and office that we should seek your concord, which we have done up until now out of friendship. For you are the most beautiful glory of all kingdoms, the helpful bulwark of the whole world, you whom other rulers look up to by law because they perceive that there is something exceptional in you. We, who with divine aid learned in your respublica how we are able to rule Romans equitably, do this most of all. Our kingdom is an imitation of yours, the image of your good intention, modeled on the one and only empire. Insofar as we follow you, we surpass all other peoples.
—King Theoderic to Emperor Anastasius in Cassiodorus, Variae 1.1.2-3At some point near the middle of the reign of Anastasius (r. 491-518), likely during a tense period for east-west relations (505-8), Theoderic, king of the Goths and Italians, sent a letter to the emperor in Constantinople which had been drafted by his prefect, the Roman senator Cassiodorus. In this letter, part of which is quoted above, Theoderic claims to be a subordinate partner in the project of Roman government and describes his rule in Italy as an imitation of the one true respublica Romana, the Roman empire of the east. Theoderic occupied an unusual position in the Roman world of the sixth century. He had been educated, as his letter mentions, in Constantinople, where he grew up as a diplomatic hostage. After being released, Theoderic established himself as the leader of a confederation of Goths whom he eventually led into Italy, with the support of the emperor Zeno (r. 474-91), to depose Odoacer, the barbarian general who had himself deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476, an event that has been taken by many modern historians to mark the fall of the western Roman empire. Once in Italy, Theoderic established a Gothic kingdom in the heartland of the former Roman empire, one that was theoretically and rhetorically subject to the emperor in Constantinople, yet functionally independent. Theoderic's rhetoric in his letter to Anastasius may have been only diplomatically polite, but it underscores a fundamental dynamic of the sixth century: the former western Roman empire, including Rome herself, now sought to legitimize its Romanness and standing in the world by reference to the emperors of Constantinople. The Roman heartland had shifted from Italy to Thrace, its political center from Rome to New Rome.

The inversion of the Roman world, in which Rome's former provincial territories came to usurp that city's traditional prerogatives as the mother of empire, can be observed independently of the fraught modern debate over whether the empire experienced a "decline and fall" or a more neutrally described "transformation." Whether or not we accept that the western Roman empire fell in 476 (or, for that matter, at any other point in the fifth or sixth century), the circumstances of its two halves and their relationship to one another had radically shifted by the year 491, when Anastasius, a self-proclaimed descendant of Pompey the Great, was acclaimed as both emperor and "true Roman" in Constantinople. These momentous changes called for explanation even at the time. Only a generation later, Marcellinus comes first proposed the idea that the western Roman empire "fell" in 476, and the first explicit historian of Roman decline, Zosimos, penned his work around 500. Scholars of the "transformation school" of later Roman history have seen in the "invention" of 476 evidence for the artificiality of the narrative of decline and fall, but we can flip this observation on its head and ask why these narratives of decline and fall began to appear at this historical moment and in the place that they did, namely Constantinople. The creation of a Roman turning point in 476 may or may not tell us much about what really happened in 476, but it does tell us a great deal about the historical thinking of the generation that followed. Likewise, discussions of Theoderic as an ideal Roman monarch in Italy, which can be found in the works of Prokopios and Jordanes, may or may not imply a fundamental continuity between the Roman and post-Roman west, but they do tell us how eastern Romans in the 550s understood the relationship between their empire and the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.

This monograph will examine the process by which the emperors, historians, jurists, antiquarians, and poets of the eastern empire employed history and mythistory in order to come to terms with the political realities of the late fifth and sixth centuries. In particular, it will focus on the creation of new historical narratives, the manner of their deployment, and the debates they inspired in order to understand how eastern Romans came to reimagine themselves not merely as eastern Romans but as the only Romans worthy of the name, a process with profound implications for our understanding of the intellectual and political climate at the end of antiquity and the beginning of Byzantium and the Middle Ages. Thus, this study will focus on a series of central questions concerning Roman identity and politics that were current at the time: What did it mean to be Roman after 476? How could an empire be Roman without the city of Rome? More pointedly, how could an empire be Roman when it was at war with Rome? How did these issues motivate and shape historical constructions of Constantinople as New Rome? How did the idea that a Roman empire could fall influence political rhetoric in Constantinople?

Whereas a great deal of scholarship has attempted to understand the post-Roman west, the process by which the Romans of Constantinople came to terms with their new place in the world and the Roman historical imagination has not been explored. This study, therefore, investigates how the shifting historical and mythistorical narratives of the sixth century reflect the attempts of eastern Romans to reconfigure their understanding of Roman history in order to account for the political realities of the sixth century, a process that began during the reign of Anastasius and continued through the publication of the major works covering the reign of Justinian in the 550s. Justinian himself will emerge as a major figure in these discussions, as eastern Romans sought to support or challenge his view of Roman history.

By deploying intellectual and cultural resources in fascinating ways, the eastern Roman empire reconstituted itself as a solitary Greek Roman empire, laying the groundwork for the later creation of Byzantine identity, itself a species of Roman identity, and the broader transition from Rome to Byzantium. In undertaking this topic, this monograph picks up the study of identity in the eastern Roman empire where Fergus Millar's seminal A Greek Roman Empire leaves off. Millar discusses the identity and independence of the eastern Roman empire during the reign of Theodosius II (r. 408-50) and makes a compelling case that, for all of their supposed political coordination, the identities and politics of east and west had already begun to diverge. However, the strategies of distinction employed by the eastern Roman empire at the time of Theodosius II were predicated on the existence of a western Roman empire. Millar himself makes clear that east and west during this period should be understood as "twin empires" and draws a distinction between phases in the development of the Greek Roman empire based on the presence or absence of a western empire. Where Millar's work focused on the period before 476, this book will take up the later period, which is distinguished by the loss of the western empire and the resulting need to reconfigure eastern Roman identity to account for its newfound solitude.

This book shares another distinctive feature with Millar's work: a focus on legal sources....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812251628
• ISBN 13: 9780812251623
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar