PAW Fellow Lunch Talk: Narrative and the Drama of Government: A Narratological Approach to Late Roman Legislation

Every year, the Program invites a distinguished scholar from one of its fields to spend a week in Princeton. The PAW fellows usually deliver one lecture and one seminar and meet the PAW graduate students in an informal setting, sharing their professional experience.

The methods of narratological analysis have rarely been applied to legal texts, and never to late Roman legislation. This paper is a foray into this largely unexplored territory and aims to demonstrate the potential of this approach by applying it to late Roman imperial constitutions. It will demonstrate the elaborateness of narrativity often displayed in these texts and elucidate key narrative devices they employ. In a second step the paper asks why and to what ends late Roman constitutions developed these elaborate narrative qualities. It will be argued that their narrative character responded to new (and perhaps somewhat unexpected) needs of imperial representation and communication in the later Roman empire and simultaneously  was embedded in a fundamental transformation of contemporary political culture: the ‘dramatization’ of government.

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Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Tübingen. He is a full member of the German Archaeological Institute and on the Advisory Board of the Commission for Ancient History and Epigraphy (AEK) in Munich, which he has chaired since 2023. His research focuses on the history of Late Antiquity, especially the fourth century, questions of statehood and state formation in the Roman Imperial period, Late Roman law, and spatial planning in the cultures of Archaic-Classical Greece.