The Crowd in Constantinople in the Late Empire: Lessons for New Rome from the Republican Populus

Abstract: This article examines popular politics in late antique Constantinople by applying the lens of modern scholarship on the Roman Republic. Although analogies between the Rome of Cicero and the New Rome of Justinian have a long pedigree, they have yet to be supported by rigorous comparative analysis that demonstrates the utility of this parallel. This article begins to address this lacuna by arguing that conceptual tools developed for studying the republican populus offer valuable insight for understanding its Constantinopolitan successor. After showing how the trajectories of research on popular politics in both fields reinforce the value of a comparative approach, two parallels concerning the Populus Romanus are explored in detail. These are, firstly, the ability to reconstitute the populus as a material entity, primarily through analysis of public space, and secondly the ideological construction of the populus at the Old and New Romes through the shared ideal of consensus. The aim of this article then is to begin to develop a comparative framework that highlights structural and ideological commonalities in how the Roman People were imagined and enacted across two chronologically and geographically distant but conceptually proximate moments in the history of the Roman state.