Mapping the Central Administration in the Later Roman Empire: The Epigraphic Representation and Elite Networks of the Palatine Bureaucracy

Before the European Union, the late Roman Empire was first in the pre-modern world a uniform hierarchically structured system with infrastructure across most of Europe and Mediterranean grounded in the overarching institutional, legal and cultural framework.

An extraordinary phenomenon of central supra-regional institutions and networks of governing elites is rarely scrutinized in scholarly accounts from an epigraphic and digital humanities perspective.

As MSCA Fellow, Dr Mariana Bodnaruk will receive crucial training in digital humanities and mix-methods approach at Warsaw University and study the late Roman states elaborate centralized machine whose officials with high political mobility were set apart from other social strata as bureaucrats in the imperial service.

The aim is to investigate what generated empire-wide mobility networks of Roman elites, and how despite regional differences officials were able to construct and sustain a supra-regional institutional framework. She will collect data in an online database and construct a digital map to visualize elite networks.

A three-month secondment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences will help her extend her training and research.

Overarching research objectives are to conduct a comprehensive empirical inquiry into court office-holders across the fourth-century empire, study epigraphic data applying the novel methodology informed by the digital and material turn, and compare the urban epigraphic representation of state bureaucrats and their networks in wider socio-political and cultural contexts answering the research question: What were the diachronic transformations of spatial and social representation and networks of Roman palatine functionaries?

Dr Bodnaruk will produce groundbreaking mixed-methods research beyond the state of art in Roman epigraphy, history and digital humanities; an online database and map; outreach and dissemination to crucial target audiences; and publications on new methods in epigraphy.