The Rhetoric of Being Roman: Fourth Century Politics and the Fall of the Western Empire

FAIN: FT-53461-05

Michael Kulikowski
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

In the year AD 212, the emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the Roman empire. This action gave Roman identity a territorial definition for the first time, establishing a hyperbolic distinction between Roman inside and barbarian outside. My study will examine how this new rhetoric of being Roman informs a uniquely late imperial political dynamic: a systemic balance between a military elite increasingly composed of barbarians and a civilian elite in control of political discourse. An analysis of the tensions within this dynamic helps explain many aspects of fourth-century culture and also opens the way to an entirely new understanding of the breakdown of imperial government in the fifth-century west.