UNMEMP · Making and Unmaking the Emperor. The use of ritual and cultural standard practices to elevate and denigrate emperors in ancient Rome (46 BC – AD 395)

In this project, I first of all want to examine the ways in which Roman emperors used ritual and cultural standard practices to elevate their position and legitimate their rule. The focus will be on standard practices which took place in the public or semi-public sphere, such as banquets and sacrifices. These standard practices bore meaning in several fields, including the military, civic, political and religious spheres. They were very visible to the Roman public and were advertised in imperial propaganda. In addition, I also want to examine the opposite, i.e. how ritual and cultural standard practices were used to attack Roman emperors. In their works, hostile authors from the Roman elite could transpose standard practices which aimed to elevate the ruler to different contexts, presenting them as negative and casting the emperor in an unfavourable light. The main question is: how did ancient authors transpose ritual and cultural standard practices that were in use as means of imperial representation into their negative reverses, thus delegitimising rulers they did not like? A connected second question is: which ritual or cultural standard practices were most frequently used in this respect? My research will make use of diverse source material, including several forms of literature – historiography, biographies, plays, poems and panegyrics – as well as coins, inscriptions, papyrus texts and architecture. I will examine Roman rulers from the time of Julius Caesar to the definite division of the empire in an eastern and western part (46 BC – AD 395). The project aims to contribute to the current discourse on ritual and cultural standard practices in representations of power and status. Study of this topic could reveal much about the limits of imperial power, the underlying discourses from which the standard practices in question took their meaning, and their relative importance in imperial representation.