Date

12-16-2025

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Chair

John D. Wineland

Keywords

Arcadius, power dynamics, 395-408 AD

Disciplines

History

Abstract

This dissertation reinterprets the reign of the Eastern Roman emperor Arcadius (395-408 CE), challenging the entrenched view of a passive figurehead by arguing that he governed through indirect, procedure-driven rule. It analyzes how Arcadius shaped outcomes via law, office rotation, ecclesiastical appointments, and controlled visibility while shifting political risk to ministers and bishops through strategic inaction. Focusing on Constantinople and the Eastern court between the deaths of Theodosius I (395) and Arcadius (408), the study employs process-tracing with falsifiable indicators: legal addressee patterns as proxies for routing nodes, rotation cadence in senior posts as a balancing and audit tool, and ritual choreography as a carrier of policy form. Primary evidence from the Codex Theodosianus, the Notitia Dignitatum, ecclesiastical historians, homilies, and letters is organized in year-bands to log confirmations and disconfirmations symmetrically. Four crisis dossiers, including the rise and removal of Rufinus, Eutropius as a public "lightning rod," the Tribigild/Gainas revolt, and the Chrysostom-Eudoxia conflicts, test authorship under stress. The findings recover clustered, templated enactments routed through stable offices and a post-crisis restoration of procedural cadence that carried intact into the early reign of Theodosius II, supporting a model of impersonally scripted authorship and reframing supposed "decline" as institutional resilience rather than imperial failure.

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