Susanna Elm’s new book arrives when it has never been clearer that gender valuation—the assignment of human beings to various categories of gender and the distribution of qualities supposedly natural to those categories—is a powerful lever of culture. You would be hard pressed to find a ruler, actual or would-be, who does not reach for it. And yet, scholarly accounts of late ancient Roman power tend to avoid it as an analytic. By contrast, The Importance of Being Gorgeous reviews the reign of Theodosius and later his sons, seeing in their imperial propaganda “a highly capacious, fluid, flexible male gender performance,” its seemingly boundless nature not a product of sovereignty, but employed specifically “to exercise sovereignty” (13, emphases mine). In addition to being an excellent work of history, this book makes the case for the integration of gender as a category of analysis into every topic of the Roman world, including—or especially—the politics of the imperial court.
Following the method so successfully adopted in her earlier works, Elm reads well-known texts anew, claiming them as a register of the contexts in which they were produced. Absent any writing from Theodosius himself, the writings of the men on his periphery are, Elm writes, “seismographs to the power to which they all sought privileged access” (17). By this term, Elm shifts agency away from panegyrists and other orators, making them readers of, but not authors of, culture. The discipline and presentation of the body, the donning or doffing of clothes or virtues, the positing of reproductive relationships and capacities: these were the indices manipulated by the Theodosian family to which others reacted, and in their reactions, materialized a record for Elm to examine.
The study comprises two parts. Part One, “Forever Young,” follows, in the 380s and 390s, Theodosian negotiations of gender and fatherhood, particularly around Honorius, who would lead the western part of the empire. Chapter One, “Civil War Triumphs and Delicate Men,” centers on the panegyric given by Pacatus to celebrate Theodosius’s victory over Magnus Maximus. Trading on tropes of femininity and the sexual availability of enslaved people, Pacatus paints Magnus not as the typical tyrant vanquished, but as a weak little slave girl. The contrast to Theodosius is clear and, in the context of legal texts that capture elite anxieties about infamous men, Theodosius stands out as the ultimate vir. In the second chapter, “Beauty, Desire, and Child Emperor Rule,” Elm demonstrates the array of tactics used to present children like Honorius as capable of inhabiting this requisite quality of manliness. With new readings of Themistius’s reflections on the emperor’s beauty and Ambrose’s funeral oration, Elm establishes the delicate negotiations required to extend imperial manliness to chubby little boys.
Chapter Three, “Top Boys,” zooms in on a highly potent dissection of masculinity, namely the Life of Heliogabalus (one part of the Historia Augusta). Its satire and hyperbole render ideological rules into portraits to be scrutinized. On display are men like Heliogabalus who are too ambiguous in their presentation, being both “clarissimus” and “exoletus” (92). Chapter Four, “Epic Warriors and Imperial Father (Figure)s,” reads the other side of the propaganda coin by looking at pieces by the poet and orator Claudian that offered up a picture of Honorius as battle-ready, even at his tender age; the striking contradiction was made logical by shifting the status of his guardian, Stilicho, from a fit-to-purpose stand-in to somehow being the boy’s real father. Elm in careful exposition reveals that it is more important to be raised by one’s “own” father, even as a substitute, than it is to be raised under the emperor’s direct care.
The second part of the book, “Soft Power,” considers how the new norm of imperial masculinity was maintained during the reign of Arcadius, particularly in the context of the eastern Capital, and visualized through reactions to the consular career of Eutropius the eunuch. In Chapter Five, “Love of Mankind,” Elm explores how multiple writers captured a pivotal moment: Theodosius arrives in Constantinople after arranging a deal to stem the Gothic threat. Themistius, Elm narrates, attempted to contextualize and characterize Theodosius’s “victory”—in fact, an undesirable compromise—with the Goths, counterposing it to his arrival in Constantinople and, perhaps unexpectedly, making much of his qualities of generosity and calm. Generosity is famously its own form of power, and Theodosius’s softness here is a feature more than a bug. Elm closely attends to language about Theodosius and his family members in Christian writings as well, noting how the program of a sublime, smooth, generous manliness is, by the end of his reign, simply the norm.
In Chapter Six, Elm tackles the paradox of “Eutropius the Consul, Eutropius the Eunuch,” as registered in Claudian’s two invectives against the man. Capaciousness is a virtue only available for certain men: what made Theodosius and some of those around him gentle and generous makes someone like Eutropius garish and gruesome. He is ugly in triplicate, by dint of being a half-man (semivir), an enslaved person, and an old woman. Not fitting any category, the consul is a monster in more than one sense; his anomalous presence highlights the perils of gender performance in the absence of power. From this Elm draws the wider lesson that “shifting ideas of what was ugly or beautiful reflect new ways of thinking about governance and what being sacred, holy, or divine should look like.” (159).
Chapter Seven, “Eutropius the Scythian, Arcadius the Jellyfish,” demonstrates the lesson, primarily through a close reading of Synesius of Cyrene’s treatise On Kingship. By careful and inventive work, Elm shows how considerations of gender reach into other classifications of humanity. Writers around the court see Arcadius as off, somehow, and to show this, Synesius reaches into the animal world—Arcadius is an invertebrate sea creature and what’s more, he is eunuch, not Roman. Here is a crossing of systems of gender, race, and even natural taxonomy that show them all to be parts of the same whole.
Chapter Eight, “The Adornment of the Altar,” analyzes the moment when Eutropius comes to claim asylum in the Great Church, and the Christian orator John Chrysostom takes advantage of him to make an example. In crisis, Eutropius needs the protection of the church; in the audience, under Chrysostom’s skillful narrative, so do all the other elites. They, too, are like Eutropius, weak and begging for mercy, waiting for the kind hand of imperial philanthropy. And thus we circle back to the fluid masculinity of the emperor, whose “philanthropy was a weapon that triumphed over excessive greed through merciful compassion and affectionate love” (241). A substantive conclusion spells out the stakes of the argument and locates their echoes in later imperial expressions of power, even out to the image of Louis XIV, the Sun King.
Elm’s prose is illuminating and muscular as always, but remarkable in this book is her use of unexpected adjectives and phrases to describe the Theodosian project: “gorgeous,” “glittering,” “fluid,” “beautiful,” “soft,” “subtle,” and “smooth,” just for starters. Girly words, words for appearances and surfaces, these may well be tongue in cheek—Elm is a serious scholar who also happens to be quite funny—but they are surely meant earnestly, too. If you are brought up short by seeing a Roman emperor labeled “the sparkler-in-chief,” the prose seems to say, then let that jolt you into rethinking your sense of the masculine. Elm shows that Theodosius expressed his gender far more extravagantly than we had previously imagined, even ravenously, as he scooped up all the good and showy qualities as his own. He is compassionate and generous, a giver not for show—it is just in his nature as a vir.
Readers of this book will know by its end: style is not separate from politics—style is politics. At the same time, style is theology. Over these chapters, Elm leads us to understand that the Theodosian program of power was inherently Christian and a peculiar version of masculinity, a “capacious, expansive, fluid, soft yet hard” vir-ness, the inescapable center of that program (248). Shifting the valuation of what was masculine and what was beautiful also shifted ideas about what was divine. All three categories are necessary for understanding imperial politics in almost any age, and The Importance of Being Gorgeous elegantly demonstrates how they work to amplify one another in the late Roman world. Scholars of early Christianity, Roman politics, and late antiquity more broadly should all read this brilliant book.