Usurpation, Legitimacy, and Panegyric

This chapter sets out the aim of this book to explore civil war through the medium of the panegyrical corpus, and justifies this potentially controversial decision. The corpus of forty-eight speeches is defined and the book sets out its unprecedented programme to draw upon all speeches and authors within the period of the late third and fourth centuries AD, uniting a vast body of evidence that is usually compartmentalized in individual studies. The chapter then explores the extent to which panegyric, as a genre, concerns itself with themes of usurpation and civil war, and explores how the polemic directed against the emperor’s enemies can be used to understand the processes by which the reputations of defeated parities in civil war were blackened.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Emperor · Legitimacy · Literature · Panegyric · Period (music) · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History