Envisioning Adventus: Ammianus between Panegyric and Polemic

This article examines the way in which the emperor is envisioned within late antique adventus ceremonial. It argues that panegyric and other media produced in proximity to the emperor sought to prescribe a certain set of visual pragmatics for the ceremony. So well-known were these pragmatics, which underpinned the successful socio-political function of the adventus, that authors who wrote at a distance from the court could subvert them to their own ends. In particular, Ammianus Marcellinus, whose narrative is often taken as exemplary of late antique adventus, used the epideictic connotations of the envisioned emperor at adventus to criticize Constantius in Rome in 357 and to praise Julian in Constantinople in 361. The conclusions stress that the form of Ammianus’s historiographic narrative, far from offering neutral reporting, reacts to and is conditioned by the conventions of panegyric.