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The Importance of Being Gorgeous: Gender and Christian Imperial Rule in Late Antiquity

By (author) Susanna Elm

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In this book, Susanna Elm radically changes our understanding of imperial rule in the later Roman Empire. As she shows, the so-called eastern decadence of the Emperor Theodosius and his successors was in fact a calculated revolution in masculinity and the representation of imperial power. Here, the emperor's hard yet soft, mature yet youthfully gorgeous beauty was central. Because the Theodosian emperors were divineâ€”gods one could seeâ€”so was their beauty: their manliness was the face and body of God. The emperors' gorgeousness, their sparkling regalia, how they wished their bodies to be seen by their elite subjectsâ€”who authored the texts on which Elm's analysis is basedâ€”were as important as laws, taxes, and armies. TheirÂ vir-ness strategically deployed male same-sex erotic desire to enhance the unity of the realm in times of tension, incorporate the signifying potency of child emperors, and create a flexible yet stable model of Christian sovereignty.