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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/36628 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | King, JaShong |
| Contributors | Greatrex, Geoffrey |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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