Competition between (In)equals: Principes and Senators (1st century B.C. – 3rd century A.D.)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gunnar Seelentag
• Subject Area: Ancient History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 501340656

Contrary to what one might assume given the duration of the Roman principate, the position of the individual princeps was precarious rather than stable, and in the traces of ancient sources on the Roman imperial period, researchers have often described the relationship of senate and senators to the princeps as ‘enmity’ or conceptualized it as ‘opposition’. The project outlined here takes a more nuanced view of this relationship and analyzes it as a form of competition ("Konkurrenz"). This competition was fostered by a facet of imperial representation that was central to the acceptance of the Roman princeps among the senatorial elite, namely being civilis: a senator, a friend, a mere first among equals. The project argues that tensions between senators and principes did not result from a superiority of the princeps and a powerlessness of the senators, but rather from the comparability of the princeps: In order to be accepted as 'good', the princeps had to act within the traditional senatorial frame of reference; and this offered senators the opportunity to compare themselves to him, to catch up with him and to challenge him. By investigating the specific constellations of competition between principes and senators in a diachronic perspective from Augustus to the ‘Year of the Six Emperors’ (27 B.C.–238 A.D.), this project also presents a hitherto undescribed mode of competition and it attempts to make it plausible that dealing with competition was one of the essential motives both for imperial representation of power and 'Realpolitik' as well as for the senatorial way of politicized life. The aim of the project is thus to complement today’s dominant paradigms of interpretation of the political system of the Roman principate. Three subprojects will examine the challenges that arose for the participants and the political system from the competitive relations between Roman principes and senatorial elites. In subproject (1), I myself would like to define the conceptual framework of this competitive relationship in a monograph and analyze the fields and forms of competition. Subproject (2) will lead to a doctoral dissertation and investigate the reciprocity relations in which the princeps was involved as an amicus as well as an institution, but from which he tried to evade. Subproject (3) will lead to another doctoral dissertation and is intended to examine, primarily from a sociological viewpoint on monarchical rule, senatorial conspiracies against the princeps as challenges to the princeps promoted by structures of competition. The unifying element of the three subprojects is to examine the viability of 'Konkurrenz' as a new paradigm of interpretation for the principate, and to arrive at a differently nuanced picture of this political order between personal power and institutionally secured supremacy of the monarch than the ones established in today's scholarship.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants