Lecture. Consistorium: The State Council of the Late Roman Emperors

The consistory is, in the history of scholarship, one of the characterising elements of the late roman empire. It is commonly considered the highest governing body, the great council of war, the supreme judicial court, the place for the production of laws, the setting for promotion ceremonies, the stage for the ostentation of power. An institution with a powerful symbolic value, whose appearance marks a watershed between the principate and a new age. The consistory seems to condense in itself many traits of the image of late antique imperial power: centralised, despotic, hieratic and almost inaccessible. Such a vision of the consistorium is, to a large extent, a historiographical myth, a construction erected by moderns on erroneous assumptions. A construction that it can be instructive to dismantle.