Editing Late antiquity (section)

==Political transformations==
[[File:John William Waterhouse - The Favorites of the Emperor Honorius - 1883.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.55|''The Favourites of the [[Honorius (emperor)|Emperor Honorius]]'', 1883: [[John William Waterhouse]] expresses the sense of moral decadence that coloured the 19th-century historical view of the 5th century.]]

The late antique period also saw a wholesale transformation of the [[political]] and [[society|social]] basis of life in and around the [[Roman Empire]].{{Citation needed|date=April 2024}}

The Roman citizen elite in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, under the pressure of taxation and the ruinous cost of presenting spectacular public entertainments in the traditional ''[[cursus honorum]]'', had found under the [[Antonines]] that security could be obtained only by combining their established roles in the local town with new ones as servants and representatives of a distant emperor and his traveling court. After Constantine centralized the government in his new capital of [[Constantinople]] (dedicated in 330), the late antique upper classes were divided among those who had access to the far-away centralized administration (in concert with the [[latifundia|great landowners]]), and those who did not; although they were well-born and thoroughly educated, a classical education and the election by the Senate to magistracies was no longer the path to success. Room at the top of late antique society was more bureaucratic and involved increasingly intricate channels of access to the emperor; the plain toga that had identified all members of the [[Nobiles|Republican senatorial class]] was replaced with the silk court vestments and jewelry associated with Byzantine imperial iconography.<ref>Cf. the compendious list of ranks and liveries of imperial bureaucrats, the ''[[Notitia Dignitatum]]''</ref> Also indicative of the times is the fact that the imperial cabinet of advisors came to be known as the ''[[consistorium]]'', or those who would stand in courtly attendance upon their seated emperor, as distinct from the informal set of friends and advisors surrounding the ''[[Augustus (honorific)|Augustus]]''.{{Citation needed|date=April 2024}}
[[File:Ctesiphon-ruin 1864.jpg|thumb|The ruins of the [[Taq Kasra]] in [[Ctesiphon]], capital of the Sasanian Empire, photographed in 1864]]