Synopsis
In this highly original work, Christopher Kelly paints a remarkable picture of running a superstate. He portrays a complex system of government openly regulated by networks of personal influence and the payment of money. Focusing on the Roman Empire after Constantine's conversion to Christianity, Kelly illuminates a period of increasingly centralized rule through an ever more extensive and intrusive bureaucracy.
The book opens with a view of its times through the eyes of a high-ranking official in sixth-century Constantinople, John Lydus. His On the Magistracies of the Roman State, the only memoir of its kind to come down to us, gives an impassioned and revealing account of his career and the system in which he worked. Kelly draws a wealth of insight from this singular memoir and goes on to trace the operation of power and influence, exposing how these might be successfully deployed or skillfully diverted by those wishing either to avoid government regulation or to subvert it for their own ends. Ruling the Later Roman Empire presents a fascinating procession of officials, emperors, and local power brokers, winners and losers, mapping their experiences, their conflicting loyalties, their successes, and their failures.
This important book elegantly recaptures the experience of both rulers and ruled under a sophisticated and highly successful system of government.
Danielle Slootjes - Ecclesiastical History
In Ruling the later Roman Empire Christopher Kelly focuses on late Roman bureaucracy and its influence on the functioning of the empire's government...His view from the "inside" gives a unique insight into the world of late Roman bureaucrats, a world characterized by increasing complexities of the bureaucratic apparatus and an inaccessibility for those from the outside...Kelly is quite successful in his attempt to "capture something of what it was like to rule and to be ruled" in the later Roman Empire. He has skillfully managed to show the human side of late Roman bureaucracy which often seemed so impenetrable. The book will clearly be indispensable for the study of late Roman administration: it has opened up avenues that had not previously been explored.