Kings of Rome, Rulers of Heaven...

Full title: Kings of Rome, Rulers of Heaven: Conceptions of Sovereignty and Empire in Syriac and Armenian Historiography
Dr. James Wolfe, 2022-23 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow
Recorded on January 11, 2023.
In their recently edited volume published in 2021, Philip Michael Forness, Alexandra Hasse-Ungeheuer, and Hartmut Leppin collected a wide array of contributions that examine common concepts of good rulership in eastern Christian communities in the global Mediterranean. Taking seriously their invitation to build on the volume’s conclusions and identify productive areas of future research, this lecture will explore concepts of sovereignty and empire in Syriac and Armenian historiography as evidence for the ontology of the Roman state in late antiquity and early Byzantium.
Although Tim Greenwood, Hartmut Leppin, and Philip Michael Forness have treated similar questions about rulership in Syriac and Armenian literature in their contributions in this volume, they have done so separately and without comparison. Wolfe argues that it is in fact through comparison that we discover that, while Syriac terminology for Roman sovereignty was both diachronically and synchronically extremely stable, Armenian terminology was not, reflecting, among other things, the evolution of Roman imperial titulature in Byzantium. This contrast, suggests divergent experiences of empire in Syriac- and Armenian-speaking communities during a period of transformation and change that reshaped the late antique Near East into the early medieval Middle East.
Dr. James (Jimmy) Wolfe is a historian of Roman institutions and the Roman imperial administration in the late antique and early medieval Middle East. His research examines the evolution of the late Roman state in this period of transformations by re-reading evidence from early Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean using non-traditional frameworks. He studies dialectics of cultural exchange in northern Mesopotamia, experiences of and impact of empire in Armenian- and Syriac-speaking communities, and the replication of Roman imperial discourses in Greek, Syriac, and Armenian historiography. James received his PhD in Greek and Latin from the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University in December 2020. He has held appointments as a Lecturer in the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.