Forever Young: Gender and Christian Imperial Representation in the Early Theodosian Age

Though Constantine made Christianity a legal Roman religion, the emperor who significantly enhanced Christian imperial rule was Theodosius I. (aka the Great). Theodosius, like Constantine and his precursors, was a most sacred and divine emperor (sacratissimus divinus imperator). As such he embodied and represented the apex of virtue, of everything Romans considered essential in a leader; that is, he was the apex of elite “manliness” or vir-ness. Theodosius’s transformation of Roman imperial rule into Roman Christian rule has received a great deal of scholarly attention. However, scholars have not asked whether and if so how these changes affected notions of imperial vir-ness, and thus elite vir-ness, though both stand paradigmatic for ideas of Rome’s eternal imperium. The lecture uses Pacatus’s praise of Theodosius’s victory over Magnus Maximus as a case study to suggest that Theodosius and his sons used capacious and fluid forms of vir-ness to signal clemency and unity in ways that significantly expanded earlier iterations of these concepts based on Christian notions of “all the peoples.”

Reception to follow.