Leadership, Ideology and Crowds in the Roman Empire of the Fourth Century AD ed. by Erika Manders and Daniëlle Slootjes (review)

The eleven chapters of this study began life as conference papers presented at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 2015. That meeting, “Medial (re)presentations—various messages: leadership, ideology and crowds in the Roman empire of the fourth century AD,” like the volume it yielded, focused on “the functioning of leadership and ideology” in the pivotal century after the reforms of Constantine altered the administrative and social structures of the empire together with the public fortunes of Christianity. So it is that bishops join emperors and congregations form part of the crowd in the essays assembled here. Although the book’s chapters range across a wide swath of methodological and historical ground, their interests coalesce around a select body of themes, enumerated below. Collectively, however, these papers simultaneously highlight the 4^th century’s distinct religious, social and political structures and underline its dependency on continuities that emanated from the cultural landscape of the early empire. One important lesson the papers of this volume suggest, therefore, is that for the educated elites of the later empire, ecclesiastical as well as secular, the Constantinian era was not an insurmountable divide; models of leadership—good and bad and as time worn as Tiberius and Trajan—remained serviceable even in the new age of Christian emperors and civic bishops.

The volume has no explicit subdivisions, but its chapters are cross-linked in multiple ways. Emperors, in action or perception, dominate the volume; only three essays foreground ecclesiastical leadership. Otherwise, reality and rhetoric are roughly balanced. Five chapters overtly tackle historical reconstruction: Gerda de Kleijn employs the social science criteria of transactional and transformational leadership and personal and positional power to assess the rule of Constantius II (337–61), finding that these heuristics yield results that harmonize with the criticism pagan writers levelled at Constantius’s failures in foreign military campaigns and his cultivation of court intrigue; Meaghan McEvoy, in order to counter the image (ancient and modern) of the “imperial jellyfish” Arcadius (395–408) as a secluded and palace-bound emperor, catalogs the many ceremonial occasions that actually brought him into view before the populace of Constantinople; Carmen Angela Cvetković reads through the performance poetry of Paulinus of Nola to glimpse the ecclesiastical politics and theological dynamics that brought the Illyrian bishop Niceta of Remesiana to Rome and Nola in the opening years of the 5^th century; Marianne Sághy turns to a range of sources, polemical and epigraphic, to evaluate the ways in which Rome’s mid-4^th century bishop Damasus mobilized his supporters in order to secure control of his city’s ecclesiastical machinery, in part by resort to force and in part through his patronage of the Roman martyrs; and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, in an essay that nicely complements Sághy’s, reads treatises and sermons against the grain to restore agency to North African crowds whose acts have typically been viewed through the lens of episcopal manipulation.

Five essays target strategies of messaging. Sometimes the media are material. Verena Jaeschke presents the architectural ensemble of the widely attested Tetrachic palace-circus complex as both a stage for imperial self-representation and a venue in which the urban populace expressed itself before the emperor, while Erika Manders reevaluates a series of civic coins minted during the reign of Maximinus Daia in order to undercut their familiar categorization as “persecution issues.” More often in this volume wordsmithing (in a wordy age) is the focus of attention. Adrastos Omissi examines imperial panegyric as a ritual “point of contact between ruler and ruled” where orators could praise those imperial qualities that subjects deemed desirable while also asserting their own and their communities hopes for more mundane rewards and benefits. Speeches also serve as the...