| FT-53461-05 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Michael Kulikowski | The Rhetoric of Being Roman: Fourth Century Politics and the Fall of the Western Empire | 6/1/2005 - 7/31/2005 | $5,000.00 | Michael | | Kulikowski | | | | University of Tennessee, Knoxville | Knoxville | TN | 37916-3801 | USA | 2005 | Ancient History | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 5000 | 0 | 5000 | 0 |
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. |