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  • 15 - Violence and Security at Court
  • Edited by Benjamin Kelly, York University, Toronto, Angela Hug, York University, Toronto
  • Book: The Roman Emperor and his Court c. 30 BC–c. AD 300
  • Published online: 29 September 2022
  • Print publication: 20 October 2022, pp 371-394
  • View extract

    Summary

    It is clear from the sources that under some emperors, the Roman imperial court could be a social space characterized by violence. This chapter offers a general framework for understanding the key dimensions of court violence – its aetiology, its impact on the court’s image, and the institutions and ideologies restraining it. Drawing on insights into human violence offered by evolutionary psychology, the chapter argues that the latent human capacity for violence was triggered by a court environment with high levels of physical danger, status consciousness, and competition for resources. But in almost all societies, culture and institutions serve to restrain interpersonal violence, to a greater or lesser degree. The second part of the chapter therefore examines the limits placed on court violence by the emperor’s guard forces (the praetorians, the Germani corporis custodes, and the equites singulares), by Roman legal culture, and by Graeco-Roman political theory and ideology.