Conclusions

Summary

My research began in 2016 with a seemingly simple question: how did the Christianisation of the Roman Empire affect the self-representation of Roman power? As I chased down self-referential statements in the writings of emperors and bishops, I became increasingly aware that how fourth-century leaders spoke of themselves was indissolubly tied to how they spoke of their culture. Negotiating the value of traditional Greco-Roman paideia and its literature(s) – attacked, upheld, manipulated, and fetishised – was an obsession in all the texts I was interrogating. Students of the fourth century often contemplate the puzzling fact that the cultures and practices cultivated for centuries across the Greco-Roman Mediterranean were willingly pushed aside in the space of a few decades. This book has addressed this issue through an analysis that is both culture- and power-centred and grounded on three statements, the first two of which might seem contradictory