John Matthews' Western Nobility and the Imperial Court: 364-525 is one of the most influential and challenging works on late antiquity in the 70s of the 20th century.
Matthews' research focused on the wealthy and idle landowning class in the western part of the empire, and the biographical approach occupied a central place in his studies.
He also devoted a great deal of space to commenting on Symacus's letters, and gave a more detailed discussion of Symacus, a representative of the late imperial patriarchal class. The policies of different emperors and the changes in the emperor's residence brought shocks and challenges to the Roman senators.
As the 21st century progressed, research on the subject began to emphasize more on the still powerful political role of the late imperial senate, and began to explore the specifics of the Senate's interconnection with the emperor.
In line with previous research, the analysis of the Shumacchus letters remains important.
Although the theme of Peter Heather's "The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History" is the barbarian invasion and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it also makes a more detailed discussion of the Roman senators, taking Syracus as an example to discuss the spiritual world of the Roman senators in the late empire, their moral pursuits and the cultural education they received, and describes in detail the process of the Roman Senate communicating with the emperor in the form of senatorial missions to the court, and then discusses the role of the Roman Senate in the process of imperial policy making. He also discusses the shortcomings of Rome as the capital at the time and the reasons why the emperor left Rome.
Cristian Sogno's Q. Aurelius Symacus: A Political Biography begins with Syracus' envoy to Trier's imperial court in 369 and continues to his envoy to Milan's court in 402. Through the process of several envoys by Symacus, the author shows the political status of the high-ranking Roman senators and the political role they can play in the imperial court, and it can be seen that the envoys to the imperial court allowed the Roman senators to participate in the high-level politics of the empire. The author argues that Symacus' interaction with the emperor's court testifies to the interdependence of senators and emperors, which is particularly evident in times of crisis. Weak or unestablished emperors and powerful officials like Stilicho needed to win over the Roman senators to consolidate their position. In turn, the senators needed the emperor to realize their political ambitions and obtain the high-ranking positions they wanted, and friends and relatives in the imperial court were also very important to the senators and were a social resource that the senators valued very much.
Robert S. Robert R. Chenault's Rome Without Emperors discusses the impact of the prolonged absence of emperors from the 4th century on the political situation in Rome, limiting the study to the Roman patriarchs. The emperor's long absence from Rome presented opportunities and challenges for the Roman senators. On the one hand, this allowed the senators to get rid of the shadow of the emperor and become more prestigious in the public sphere of Rome. On the other hand, the senators had to admit that real power had shifted outside Rome. He argues that although the rebellion of Eugenius under Theodosius I is often seen as a resistance of polytheistic patriarchs to the Christian regime of Theodosius, its roots are undoubtedly political in nature. The Senate dedicated an inscription to Stilicho in the Roman Forum, an honor originally reserved for the emperor and seemed to indicate that the Senate could replace the emperor's role in Rome with a barbarian general. After the Goths sacked Rome in 410, the senators had to fight against increasingly powerful barbarian generals and bishops. It was becoming increasingly difficult for the senators to control their own destiny.
Most of the previous research periods have focused on the 4th century AD, Michele Renee Salzman's "The Fall of Rome", which significantly reverses the study period, discussing the several crises experienced by the city of Rome in the late 4th and early 6th centuries, and the author proposes the concept of the "resilience" of the city of Rome after the disaster, and the revival of the city of Rome was largely led by the Roman senators, so the senators became the focus of the author's research. In this book, the author first sorts out several paradigms of previous late Roman historical research, and then proposes a new perspective, namely the resilience of Rome, and discusses the role of the Roman senatorial class in several revivals of Rome in late antiquity and the relationship between the Roman senator and the imperial court.
