Abstract
This thesis examines the issues of gender roles and political influence of Roman empresses in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Three Late Antique empresses-Flaccilla (r. 383-386 CE), Eudoxia (r.400-404 CE), and Galla Placidia (r.421-450 CE)-sought to affirm their political roles as Augustae, Christians, and dynasts through issuing coinage. In this thesis, coins are the primary medium of political expression, through elements such as the inscriptions of titles on the obverse and pictorial personifications and descriptive inscriptions on the reverse. Reverse images, such as the personification of Victory and the laurel wreath of victory, communicated the messages of dynastic continuity and religious legitimacy for these Late Antique empresses. Both messages came to the fore as avenues through which the Theodosian emperors and empresses could establish themselves as political and religious heirs to the Constantinian dynasty. The imagery on the coins issued during the reigns of Flaccilla, Eudoxia, and Galla Placidia reflected the efforts of these Theodosian empresses to assert their ownership of a political identity that was linked with one another and linked with the first recorded Christian Roman empress, Helena.
I argue in this thesis that, regardless of whether Helena was Christian, Eusebius' textual account of her provided Late Antique empresses with a model of expected behavior for a Christian empress. Helena's coins also provided a pictorial representation of a Roman consort later used by the Theodosian empresses. The reverse imagery of Helena's coins, though secular, reappeared on the coins of Late Antique empresses. In order to establish their influence over religion in the Eastern and Western empires, Flaccilla, Eudoxia, and Galla Placidia combined the imagery from Helena's coins with Christian symbols employed in the reverse imagery of coins of emperors from the Constantinian and post-Constantinian years. The secular imagery on Helena's coins was refashioned by the Theodosian empresses to include the Chi-Rho or cross, and thereby expressed the potency of religious and dynastic legitimacy for the Theodosian empresses. This thesis presents a study of the propagandistic meaning of the imagery in order to discover what relationships existed between pagan and Christian imagery, the offices of the Augustus and Augusta, and the Eastern and Western empires in the Late Antique period
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