ABSTRACT
In his substantial contribution on “The Imperial court of the Late Roman Empire” in the recent volume addressing The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies, Rowland Smith makes a passing suggestion to the effect that the court functioned-in terms of the themes addressed in the present volume-as an arena of intense cultural negotiation and a point of interaction between “high” and “low” culture. Citing the claim of Norbert Elias that the Bourbon court at Versailles functioned as an instrument for the ‘domestication’ of a feudal warriornobility, Smith turns this formulation on its head: “[O]n the supposition that the late Roman court served to ‘domesticate’ elements of any ‘warrior-elite,’ that elite would be more plausibly associated with the new, non-aristocratic breed of ‘soldier-emperors’ that had emerged in the mid-to-late third century … ”.1
