“Father of the Whole Human Race”
“Father of the Whole Human Race”
Ecumenical Language and the Limits of Elite Integration in the Early Roman Empire
This chapter analyzes Roman efforts to integrate local elites in the eastern provinces of the early Roman empire. It reviews the many sources of difference—legal, cultural, and ethnic—that divided local populations from each other and from their Roman rulers, highlighting in particular the gap between the imperial elite and local elites in the east. Roman rulers and civic elites engaged in a dialogue of decrees and letters that worked to bridge that gap by imagining an empire in which “the whole human race” was equally subject to the emperor. The chapter illustrates the importance of discursive practices in bridging the divide between imperial and local elites even in an empire normally taken as the model of elite integration.
Keywords: Roman empire, assimilation, subordination, ecumenical, letters, imperial elite
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