Production of Distinction: Senatorial Self-representation in the Later Roman Empire

Unlike the imperial representation, the role of the civic elites rapidly rising to prominence from the early fourth century CE onwards has received much less scholarly attention. Modern scholarship on elites in the later Roman state has been primarily an application of insights that were initially developed in the historiography of the early empire. W. Eck’s fundamental study on the self-representation of the senatorial elite in Rome of the Augustan period (Eck 1984: 129-67) extended to the later empire. Only recently did scholarship assess the changing interrelation between the senatorial aristocracies and the centers of political power reflected in changing patterns of the representation of the former (Niquet 2000; Gehn 2010), and gradually become perceptive to the wider economical and social contexts of the transformation of elites in late antiquity (Banaji 2002; Haldon 2004; Sarris 2009). Comparative studies systematically juxtaposing senatorial elites of the early, high, and later Roman Empire are yet to be written. My main objective is to engage elite representation through artistic and epigraphic media in an interdisciplinary approach combining visual with narrative sources in order to analyze how imperial ideology shaped the production of distinctions among diversified groups of senatorial elite in the forth-century Roman Empire. This project seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the political and cultural change in the Roman Empire in the period between Constantine and Theodosius I (306-395 CE).