Dynasty in the Roman empire: definitions, terminology, and concepts

ABSTRACT

This is the introductory article for a special issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies on the topic of ‘Dynasty in the Roman Empire: Politics, Rhetoric, Representation’. The issue’s title encapsulates our three entangled foci: the politics of dynastic strategies and negotiations and their impact; the rhetorical construction of dynasty through names, titles, and relationships; and the representational strategies and responses by different actors and agents. This article functions both as the Introduction to the special issue and an interrogation of Roman definitions, terminology, and concepts of dynasty deployed between the late first century BCE and the sixth century CE. Our aim is to test whether or not two key etic definitions of dynasty drawn from modern scholarship—its corporate nature (‘a kinship-based community of stakeholders in public authority’) and its seriality (‘a succession of rulers of the same line or family’)—can be applied to the Roman Empire.