This chapter has two purposes. First, it outlines the problems of and methods for finding the popular voice in our evidence from Roman antiquity. Utilising James C. Scott’s paradigm of hidden transcripts, this chapter argues that wider perceptions of the Roman emperor can be excavated from a wide-range of different material. Second, the chapter explores the history and historiography of the Roman emperor and how the power of the Roman emperor has been described and understood in antiquity and beyond.

The consolidation of French kingship in the 13th century was accomplished by a group of jurists – the legists – trained in the Civil Law and ready to imagine their ruler as princeps after the Roman model. No longer simply a feudal suzerain, Philip the Fair would assert his legal authority against provincial lords, against the head of the Roman Church (Boniface VIII), and against whoever would possess the imperial throne. Although described as legibus solutus by his legal counsel, Philip remained dependent on the material resources possessed by his most powerful vassals, by the church orders and by his bankers, all of whom were learning to invoke their dominium proprietatis against the dominium iurisdictionis of their king.

The third chapter examines the iconography of the ‘hand of God’ spread during the late Roman Empire from the mid-third century onwards, and in the context of interactions between pagan, Jewish and Christian cultures. This particular iconography leads directly to the idea of self-coronation – although still an iconographic rather than performative reality – since it conveys the emperor being crowned by a celestial hand from above, without priestly intervention. Numismatic sources emerge here as crucial evidence, particularly in the case of third- and fourth-century Roman emperors. The iconography of the emperor being crowned by the hand of God did not extend to early Byzantium, but survived in medieval art through the iconography of the king or emperor being crowned by Jesus Christ.