ABSTRACT
In the late Roman and Byzantine periods, panegyric featured prominently in the lives of the inhabitants of towns and cities under Roman and Byzantine rule. The combination of a love for oratorical performance with the need of the military dictators to be addressed and acknowledged by their public, it might be suggested, conspired to generate that peculiar brand of epideictic oratory called imperial panegyric. Panegyrics can offer significant opportunities to understand the attitudes, values and political ideology of emperors. If panegyric allowed the possibility of assisting an emperor in the formation of his policy, it becomes more feasible to suggest that at least a modicum of independent political expression was available to an emperor’s subjects. The Panegyric of 297 may help to understand some of the attendant circumstances, for its orator mentions that some Gallic merchants had joined Carausius.
