Grammars of Government in Late Antiquity

In this paper, I will analyze the impact of rebellions on the construction of governmental styles in the Visigothic Kingdom. Like the Late Roman Empire, the successor kingdoms in the West witnessed rebellions aimed at overthrowing ‘legitimate’ rulers. Rebellion (successful or not) was an endemic feature of this kingdom from its inception in the fifth century until its fall in the early eighth century. Challenges to rulers opened up the opportunity to define normative expectations on the proper behavior of kings and governors.

This paper argues that taxation in Ostrogothic Italy was an important means by which Ostrogothic rulers sought to generate the idea of a harmonious society and that the rhetoric of this policy is visible in the Variae of Cassiodorus. Ostrogothic Italy has enjoyed a long reputation in modern scholarship as one of the most successful amalgamations of imperial Roman political tradition, Germanic military aristocracy and emergent Christian culture (Momigliano 1955; Hen 2007; Arnold 2014).

The growth and spread of official status designations are a distinctive feature of late antique documents. Every reader of sources from this period has been struck by the fact that the names of practically all elite men and women are accompanied by extravagant epithets characterizing them as “most glorious”, “extremely perfect,” “most magnificent,” and so on. These epithets are not applied randomly but tend to follow certain rules. They are an empire-wide system. They are clearly a fundamental element of the language developed by the later Roman State to classify and organize society.

In this paper, I explore the impact of Roman languages of government on the North African countryside in late second and third centuries CE. As a case study, I draw on the evidence of the inscription from Saltus Burunitanus (CIL VIII 10570 = ILS 6870). The text is a subscriptio, a reply of the emperor Commodus to a petition in which a group of peasants on an imperial estate in central Algeria complain about maltreatment by their managers.