JaShong King

This project proposes to study how Roman government, in both the east and west, functioned in Late Antiquity, around the time of the "fall" of the western empire in 476 CE. It does so by taking a digital humanities approach to the analysis of Late Roman legal codes, codes which would later on become the foundation for many of our modern laws. This project's main conjecture is that these laws reflect high-priority responses by emperors to interest groups, and by creating a digital edition that encodes targets of imperial legislation via XML-TEI markup, a database can be created that maps out which groups had the most political influence on the center of government. By doing so, a theory can be formulated that explains supposedly paradoxical decision-making on the part of emperors, decisions which arguably favored short-term thinking to placate political acceptance groups but which failed to deal with issues that caused the long-term breakup of the empire.

Roman emperors came to power through a hybrid dynastic/elective selection system that was never formally codified. This lack of codification has caused problems for modern scholars looking to identify and categorize those who were involved in selecting the next Roman emperor. This thesis believes that these problems exist because scholars are not distinguishing the names of key ancient institutions from the underlying types of power which backed their capability for action. This thesis seeks to solve this problem by creating a categorization system for imperial accessions based around a basic unit called the “political interest.” At its core, a political interest is a combination of the name of the individual or group as listed in the primary sources, the different types of power they possessed, and the level of decision-making authority they wielded during an imperial selection. Using this system, this thesis creates a database of Late Roman emperors with information on when they came to power, the various stages of their accessions, what political interests supported them, and where these interests were located. This thesis then analyzes the political and geographic trends from the database and supplies provisional explanations as to why changes in the Late Roman accession process occurred.

The religious categorization of the Banu Qurayza and other Arabian tribes may not have occurred until after the initial conquest of Arabia. The designation of the Qurayza and other tribes as Jewish or polytheist may have been for the purposes of creating political and religious “outsiders” in the later years of the conquest, whereas previously they were viewed as belonging to the same political and religious community as Muhammad. These “others” could then be useful to later Islamic historians living after the initial conquests as examples of antagonists whom Muhammad could safely eliminate without political consequence in either narratives of the formative Islamic period, or perspectives of their current period.

When did Julian, the last "pagan" Roman emperor, come to power? Was it in 355 CE, the year he was made a caesar/junior emperor by his cousin the augustus/senior emperor Constantius II? Was it in 360 CE, the year that he was acclaimed as an augustus by his army? Or was it in 361 CE, the year that the civil war between the two ended with Constantius II's sudden death, after which Julian made his triumphal entry into Constantinople to the applause of the senate and the people of the city?

I will argue, through the example of these three "accessions" of Julian, that one way of clarifying both ancient and modern debates over the foundations of imperial power is by seeing them as subtypes of social power. I assert that each "foundation" represents an attempt at controlling the inclusion and exclusion of participants within or for the formation of a ruling political coalition. In Julian's case, dynastic legitimacy limited the decision-making coalition to the ruling family, coercive power limited the coalition to military commanders and their armed forces, and adherence to ritual limited the coalition to capital city groups such as the senate, the church, the bureaucracy, or the factions. Imperial accessions like Julian's are particularly useful for identifying key political players because they were opportunities for the renegotiation of coalitions.

In both ancient China and the classical Mediterranean, walls had a similar, albeit not entirely overlapping, impact on civic identity.  However, where Roman and Chinese empires might share a greater similarity, is in the effect defensive walls had on the complexity of politics within a city, specifically that of the imperial capital.  I assert that the relationship between capital city walls and political complexity is a continuum, with early imperial Rome on the low end of the defensibility/complexity spectrum and Late Roman Constantinople and Eastern Han Luoyang on the other end.

This idea follows René Pfeilschifter, who proposed that the solidity of Constantinople's Theodosian Walls in the fifth and sixth century CE were what allowed for the myriad and complexity of political factions inside the Late Roman capital.  This presentation plans to apply his theories to two specific incidents in Chinese and Roman history, the eunuch coup and warlord takeover of Luoyang (189 CE) in the east, and the Year of the Four Emperors (69 CE) in west.  The Luoyang incident represents a similar circumstance to Late Roman Constantinople, whereas the Year of the Four Emperors represents inverse circumstances.

By conceiving of these similarities and differences as a continuum, we can suggest that the relationship between fortifications and politics is not just a localized phenomenon but a global and cross-temporal one as well.  The broader relevance of expanding Pfeilschifter's theories would be in future investigations and comparisons with other societies and other time periods, in order to see just how far this fortification and political complexity relationship goes.

The purpose of this presentation is to see if we can identify trends in the ancient evidence to help us hypothesize a reason for the name John's popularization over Late Antiquity, whether to simply test and/or refute theories regarding early Christian naming conventions.

Although there are many military manuals from the ancient world, Julius Africanus’ Cesti is the only one which uses methods we in the modern world might consider “magic.”  However, Africanus seems to have a different sense of whether something is “magic” or not.  This presentation breaks down the strategems by mechanism of action, contextualizing the methods listed with other ancient equivalents in order to compare the difference between ancient and modern perspectives on where his strategems lie on the “magic” spectrum.

Despite differences between the "global"/military backers of would-be emperors in the 4th century and the "local"/capital-focused backers in the 6th, the way a new emperor was chosen still revolved around the structuring of access to the emperor. It is only the geographic specifics of that negotiation of access that changed. Two late Roman imperial elections are illustrative of this access dynamic, that of Jovian in 363 and Justin I in 518.

Many still consider the making of a new Visigothic king, whether by election or inheritance, to be Germanic in origin.  However, when one compares the descriptions of accessions between Visigothic and Late Roman historians, the similarities in language are striking and at times indistinguishable.  This presentation suggests that Visigothic accession could be explained as derived mostly from Roman contact and exchange, rather than from an insular Germanic origin.

Ancient Rome and China constitute two of the foundational civilizations and traditions for a significant part of the modern world.  This presentation lays out some of the more intriguing parallels, elaborates on existing approaches, as well as raises several theoretical problems both specific to Rome and China as well as general to comparative history.

Sasanid political history was a history of the negotiation of power between the kings of the ruling dynasty and the aristocracy.  The Persian nobility were committed to the dynastic system so long as no alternative existed.  However, as soon as the Sasanid kingship reached its nadir after the 603-628 CE war with the Eastern Roman Empire and an alternative was presented with the Arabs, Persian aristocratic commitment to the Sasanid dynasty was dispensed with.

The anti-idolatry element of early Islam's mission was most likely rhetorical, since idolatry as it was understood by later Muslims did not exist during Muhammad's time.  The actual conflict was over the nature of divine intermediaries to God, which was the core dilemma of the Satanic Verses story.  For the question ultimately asked of early Islam was whose messengers had intercessionary power, the ones of the old gods, or the ones of Muhammad's new God?

How could the Roman gods of the emperor Julian have provided good fortune to him in his rise to ultimate power and then suddenly take it away, with his supposed mission to restore traditional religion incomplete? The purpose of this research paper is to examine how contemporary Greek historians resolved this contradiction.  The paper will make the case that it was Ammianus and Libanius’ understanding of Fortune and Fate as complementary to each other, views partially derived from their backgrounds, that allowed them to reconcile Julian’s early luck with his untimely death.

The rise and fall of religious travel for women in the Late Antique Mediterranean was the result of changes in perceptions over women’s gender roles, which allowed them to take part in men’s experimental ascetic practices, like wandering.  What holy men could do, holy women could do.  But as the former lost their ability to travel, so too did the latter.