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The article deals with four porphyry statues wearing late antique tunica-chlamys attire in Vienna, Berlin, Ravenna and in the Louvre. By the provenance of two of them and by deals of workmanship they are all clearly linked to the porphyry workshop that the tetrarchs had installed in Egypt. Yet they differ from the main products of this workshop not only by their new costume but also in their overall shape. Whereas the tetrarchs employed local sculptors, who specialized in working hard stone for their new porphyry workshop and the result was a fascinating mixture of imperially commissioned and strong local elements, these chlamydate follow other models of more classical taste. They attest to new imperial instructions given to the workshop. This makes it important to know when this new form of imperial representation was introduced. Suggested dates differ widely this article proposes to date the statues in Ravenna and the Louvre by means of their close typological and stylistic similarities to the statue of Oikoumenios form Aphrodisias, which itself is dated by its portrait, which is the closest known parallel to early Theodosian emperor’s portraits at Aphrodisias and Constantinople. The common link between the locally-produced honorific statues from Aphrodisias, the imperial porphyry workshop in Egypt, and the statue finds in Italy would then be Constantinople, whose sculpture workshops were heavily influenced by those of Aphrodisias. There are reasons to see the statues at Vienna and Berlin as earlier and representing a development o the new iconography. All this seems to correspond with the ideas of U. Gehn and R.R. R. Smith, who posit, that the use of late antique chlamydate and togati for honorific statues developed mainly in the later 4th century and in the east. It may have evolved during and after the reign of Valens, parallel to the intensified lawgiving concerning status marking. There should e parallels to this in the emperor’s ‘Chlamys/Dienstkostüm’. - In the end, there are some remarks on the ‘hand-on-sword’ gesture of the statues.

This article examines the public image of the emperor Carausius, a Roman army officer who claimed authority over Britain and parts of Gaul between 286 and 293, in opposition to Diocletian and his Tetrarchic colleagues. Carausius' coinage celebrated his fleet, his naval prowess, and his divine support from Neptune and Oceanus. These designs were created as part of a strategy to refashion Carausius' humble background as a sailor into a statement of imperial suitability. However, Carausius' claims were undermined by the orators who delivered speeches in praise of his Tetrarchic rivals, Maximian and Constantius, in the years 289, 291, and 297. Their panegyrics subverted Carausius' naval experience and claim to control the Ocean, instead portraying him as a pirate, brigand, and threat to the people of Gaul. After the reconquest of Britain, the medallions and monuments of the Tetrarchic regime commemorated their own naval success and control over the Ocean, suppressing the claims of Carausius. The propaganda campaign against Carausius was driven by the fact that he was an emperor of undistinguished origin, who had risen up through the ranks of the army, just like the Tetrarchs themselves. The emperors wished to distance themselves from their former colleague in order to discourage further rebellion from within the officer corps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imperial women associated with the rulers of the First and Second Tetrarchies are unaccountably absent from sculpture, coinage, inscriptions, and monuments, and not one was awarded the titles that by the third century had become commonplace for empresses. The absence is surprising given that marital alliances are generally supposed to have been a prescribed part of the Tetrarchic plan for controlled succession. A close analysis of the written sources reveals that this presumption is in fact hard to maintain and yields the surprising by-product of a new perspective on the question of Constantine's and Maxentius's presumed status as heirs-apparent prior to 305 ce. Furthermore, drawing together both written and visual evidence—sources not often enough deployed in tandem when discussing the imperial families of the Tetrarchic age—this article argues that the omission of Tetrarchic empresses from the ideological realm was part of a conscious effort to distance the rulers from their subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In autumn 303 Diocletian visited Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his reign. Even though there is no explicit documentary confirmation, Constantine was most likely a member of his entourage. During this visit Constantine probably met Fausta, his future wife, and he would have learned about the city's new fortifications. He also could have met many important senators and their sons, and he would have evaluated Diocletian's behavior as a Tetrarchic emperor at Rome. This experience would strongly influence Constantine's own actions and policies when he returned to Rome in October 312. He defeated Fausta's brother, Maxentius, he promoted senators, and he expanded senatorial rank. He also adopted a "senatorial" style of emperorship that rejected or transformed aspects of Diocletian's Tetrarchic model of imperial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on a conference on the history of royal, dynastic, and political succession in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, held in Konstanz, Germany, from July 25-27, 2013. Topics of discussion included the legitimacy of new rulers, royal succession in the Seleucid Empire, and the tetrarchy in Imperial Rome.

This paper contributes to the issue of how tradition intermingles with the innovative politics and ruling system of the Diocletianic tetrarchy. It focuses on the formative as well as on the dramatic, performative aspects of the past. The different modes of dealing with Roman history are to be shown by examples from four major classes of evidence: the monumental (Arch of Constantine), epigraphic, papyrological and rhetorical documents of the Later Roman Empire. Particularly the staged aspects of social interactions as reflected in this material turn out to be an obstacle for any change. Though concordia of the four emperors was omnipresent in tetrarchic propaganda, an inscription from the Egyptian island of Elephantine and a series of papyri from the Panopolite archive of the scholastikos Ammon show that interaction between individuals and the "local" Augustus remained in the field of personal face-to-face relationships. Its main characteristics can be grasped in stylized forms of gift exchange spanning occasionally many generations of a family and thus being part of the individual memoria: imperial letters are but reifications of that common history. In this way, Ammon's brother, the rhetor Harpokration, contributes with his pronouncing basilikoi logoi at the court of Diocletian to maintaining the status of his family as members of the local elite by imperial appointment to priesthood. His rhetorical gift to the emperor was an utterly valuable one: late antique panegyrics were strongly bound to tradition trying to inscribe the present into glorious Roman past, thereby naturalizing new forms of rule. But an analysis of Panegyricus Latinus X (AD 289) shows the difficulties and risks faced by rhetors thriving to find analogies to the dyarchic system in the days of Rome's beginnings. Constantine did much better in amalgamating traditional and innovating elements into a cogent display of power when celebrating his decennalia in the metropolis. His arch succeeded in formulating autocracy in a new code out of traditional elements, inserting his claim into a framework of well accepted signs and rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]