Teaching History and Celebrating the Princeps: The Rhetoric of Landscape in the Panegyrici Latini,

In the corpus of the Latin Panegyrics, a third-fourth century product of the rhetorical schools in Gallia, landscape is a notion embedded in history and political propaganda. Composed within a time span of hundred years (289–389 CE), under the Tetrarchs and the reigns of Constantine and Theodosius, the panegyrics glorify the divine virtues of the princeps as deus praesens and offer an idealized vision of landscape, fruit of the beneficial influence of the emperors on natural and manmade environments. The representation of ‘sacred’ landscapes serves as a means of perpetuating the cultural and moral values integral to imperial ideology. More, it stimulates the knowledge of history and geography by connecting the description of the regions and places conquered by the emperors to the process of Romanization and the formation of a new Roman identity, based on the universal approval for imperial politics. This paper focuses on the ‘rhetoric of landscape’ in the panegyrics and points to the intersection of rhetorical strategies, theology, and political propaganda in the idealization of landscape as a return to the mythic Golden Age. Firstly, it concentrates on the role played by geographical maps in teaching history and celebrating the emperors’ accomplishments, as demonstrated by Eumenius’ Panegyric. Then, it elaborates on the images of divine landscapes in the panegyrics and the use of religious imagery in the rhetorical-political revival of the Golden Age landscape. In addition to enabling us to appreciate the relationship between geographical spaces and power during the Empire, the panegyrics also testify to how territorial and political expansion under the Tetrarchs and Constantine impacted on the formation of a new concept of landscape as revelation of the supernatural qualities of the emperor.