The final chapter demonstrates what the implications of the model developed are for one of the central figures of Late Antique society, the emperor, which plays a crucial role in current interpretations. Building on and nuancing the two current frameworks, constitutionalism and acceptance theory, the chapter argues that we can make sense of imperial power in Late Antiquity by seeing it as a virtue-based social role and tied into practices that both enabled the emperor to exercise power and constrained it. Whilst a long scholarly tradition considers that the Later Roman Empire is marked by the expansion of imperial power and an increased distance between emperor and subject, symbolized in the expansion of bureaucracy and ceremony, it is argued here that even in this period the role of the emperor was conceived of, and exercised, in interaction with other individuals and the people.

The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.

This chapter focuses on parrhesia, the ancient term for criticizing a superior, typically the emperor. This was a particularly tricky thing to do, not only given the power of the emperor, but also because the superior was supposed to be more virtuous than their inferior. Through a display of virtue, the inferior could temporarily overcome the social distance and speak out. Contrary to current views that parrhesia was only really possible in democratic societies and therefore in Late Antiquity the preserve of marginal figures of society, such as holy men, I show that parrhesia was a much more widespread practice that, however, demanded great skill and courage.

This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.

This chapter argues that in the Late Antique notion of “the people,” a normative aspect is present: the people is not just a social designation, but also acquires a constitutional sense if a group of individuals puts itself in a relationship of justice with the emperor (or, for that matter, a bishop). Indeed, the notion of emperor and people are coconstitutive: the one cannot exist without the other. This helps us to understand the political role the people played in Late Antique society, in the absence of institutions such as voting assemblies through which it could express itself. Seen through this lens, riots are occasions when it was questioned if the ruler truly was just. If the relationship could not be mended, the people could favor someone else as ruler. Thus, although there were numerous riots in Late Antiquity, they never questioned the social system but only sought to establish a personal interaction that could ensure justice.

This chapter considers how the paradigm of the imperial judge, discussed in Chapter 3, was challenged by the political unrest and legitimacy crises of the Severan period. It does so through a close analysis of rescripts attributed to the child emperor Severus Alexander. Alexander’s rescripts exhibit two unusual rhetorical tendencies. First, several of them predate Alexander’s reign and are in fact relabeled rescripts of his disgraced predecessor Elagabalus; this relabeling shows that the link between imperial authorship and legitimacy had become more tenuous in the late Severan period. Second, rescripts of Alexander are unusually likely to portray the emperor as following prior imperial precedent and especially those precedents of his Severan forebears. I argue that both maneuvers can be thought of as a response to the problems posed by child rule; while Alexander’s own judgment might not be legitimate, his rescripts paint him as a caretaker for a dynastic legal order that was.