The Palatine Secretaries

It is the achievement of Tony Honore to have pioneered a new approach to the imperial constitutions, seeking to treat them not as uniform chancery products issued in the name of an imperial college, but as literary texts produced by individual authors.1 His argument is that imperial laws and rescripts (despite later editing) can be read with an eye to style and attitude, and that doing so with the texts assembled into a chronological palingenesia enables the detection of stylistic changes over time. Constitutions, therefore, can be divided not only by the reigns of emperors, but also by the succession in office of the ultimate authors of imperial pronouncements, the palatine secretaries. Thus a form of anonymous stylistic fasti can be created for certain offices, followed by identification in some cases with appropriate figures known from other evidence.

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