ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a survey of the way the motif of the emperor as a military figure and man of war changed over time. Roman emperors had always had a military aspect, and in the later Empire, emperors shifted between military strongmen, heroic warriors, and impersonal icons of victory, leaning heavily upon militaristic and violent messaging in their self-representation in different media: literature, coinage, and monumental art. Even non-campaigning emperors like Justinian continued to use militaristic imagery in their self-representation. Yet from the eighth to the late tenth century, there is a near absence of visual imagery with violent or militaristic depictions of the emperors—even for those who actively went to war—in favour of more ceremonial and religious motifs. This apparent shift in ideology can be read in the light of contemporary political events—but this shift was not purely linear, and the change away from the martial representation of the emperor was not permanent. In the wake of a series of Byzantine military successes from the tenth century, we find the re-emergence of soldier-emperors as role models and paradigms in a wide range of literature and visual art.
