From Augustus’ Shield to Theodora’s Church: Imperial Virtues, Inscriptions, and Changing Discourses on Power in Late Antiquity (original) (raw)

This paper purports to look at how the development of the set of imperial virtues celebrated in inscriptions (particularly in the eastern part of the empire) can be traced in late antiquity. The central question is to what extent the nascent and burgeoning Christian theology and wider contemporary discourse on the God-sanctioned imperial power penetrated the epigraphic record and reshaped it. The representation of images of imperial power through visual means (numismatics and epigraphy) has usefully come in focus of recent studies (like C. Noreña’s Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power). On the other hand, the birth and progress of the specifically Christian version of the Hellenistic concept of emperor as the representative of God with a very special link with the divine (famously formulated in Eusebius’ Tricennalian Oration in 335-36 AD and taken on by an unfailing flow of followers later) has long been studied as the foundation of the later Byzantine philosophy of power. However, the studies of the workings and implementation of these ideas through epigraphy have not been abundant. Arguably, imperial pietas, while being a traditional Roman imperial virtue, was substantially expanded in the early Christian epigraphic discourse on emperors. The inscription on Constantine’s statue put up in Rome (as reported in Eusebius’ HE 9.9.11: “τούτῳ τῷ σωτηριώδει σημείῳ <…> τὴν πόλιν ὑμῶν ἀπὸ ζυγοῦ τοῦ τυράννου <…> ἠλευθέρωσα”) proclaimed the power of salvific cross as emperor’s ally; the Byzantine emperor in the 6th century came to be addressed as θεοστέφεος in inscriptions, which entered the official imperial titulature later. Inscriptional innovations, it would seem, were both informed by the theological and political discourses on imperial divine engagement and fed back into it in their turn. In a nutshell, this paper looks at what possible routes could lead from Augustus’ four cardinal virtues in the clipeus virtutum to Justinian’s and Theodora’s Christian imperial piety in the inscription in the church of St Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople in 530-ies.