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

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.