Law and a Debate about Monarchy in early fifth century Constantinople

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 13
Room: 
001
Thursday, October 2, 2014 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Thursday, October 2, 2014 - 5:30pm to 7:15pm

The Theodosian Code, published by the Roman emperor Theodosius II in AD 437, is the most comprehensive codification of Roman imperial law prior to Justinian’s corpus and a revolutionary achievement in the history of Roman legal thought and Roman governmental practice. In recent years, intense research has contributed to our understanding of its structure, content, and broader historical context and helped to situate its emergence in the legal culture of the age. This paper takes a different approach to explain the codification project: It argues that the Code must be read as witness to a crisis of imperial rule in the earlier fifth century that triggered, among others, a critical discourse about the relationship between law and monarchical rule. As will be seen, the Code can be seen as evidence for competing conceptions of that relationship, and this competition can also explain its peculiar form and genesis. The Theodosian Code thus gains a central place not only in Roman legal history but also in the shaping of imperial rule in the Later Roman Empire.

 Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner is Professor for Ancient History at the University of Tübingen, Germany, since February 2014; prior to that he was Assistant Professor in Basel and Heidelberg and began a career outside academia. He holds a MSt. degree from Oxford University (2001) and obtained a PhD in Ancient History at the University of Marburg, Germany (2005). His research focuses on two areas: One is the history of the Later Roman Empire, with an emphasis on Late Roman law, the workings and semantics of imperial government and the history of the city in Late Antiquity. The other focus is the history of Classical Greece where his main area of research is the political imagery of Classical Athens; an ongoing book project concerns spatial and landscape metaphors in Athenian political discourse.