Introduction: Journal of Late Antiquity, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2021

This special issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity includes all seven revised and peer-refereed papers presented at the one-day colloquium “Envisioning the Roman Emperor in Speech and Word in Late Antiquity.” This gathering, organized by Jan Willem Drijvers and Meaghan McEvoy and held at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) on 25 July 2018, focused on the issue of how, in a period of change from the fourth to fifth century ce, a renewal of imperial leadership and ideology was initiated in order to recreate stable rule. It explored one of the principal ways in which this can be observed, through surviving spoken and written perspectives on late Roman rule. After the “crisis” of the third century, the Roman empire reinvented and revived itself thanks to the reforms of Diocletian and his Tetrarchic regime, as well as to the long, stable reign of Constantine. In this new Roman empire, emperorship and imperial ideology were reformulated, making use of the traditions of the past and introducing new elements. One of the key aims of the colloquium was to consider the processes by which imperial leadership was reshaped and framed in order to secure imperial rule once more after a period of crisis. Pivotal to the colloquium was the question of how texts and speeches about emperors and their families in the late Roman period functioned in communicating imperial rule and ideology.