Addressing the Emperor

[Nathan Ross]

My immediate thought was to look at Vegetius, whose treatise was addressed to his emperor... when he addresses him directly in the vocative, he calls him 'Invincible Emperor' (imperator invicte).

Yes, I was thinking of Vegetius. The addresses to abstract virtues would be necessarily indirect!

would this be after Diocletian's move from Principate to Dominate? Would I be right in saying that earlier emperors would not have had such formality...?

Diocletian seems to have formalised a lot of aspects of court ritual, including the 'godlike' status of the emperor. Although some of the third century emperors (Aurelian springs to mind) were already heading in this direction. The change (very generally) was from calling the emperor Princeps to calling him Dominus...

The emperors of the Principiate varied - one at least (Domitian) allegedly wanted to be addressed as 'Master and God' (dominus et deus), which at the time was thought pretty outrageous. Calling the emperor Caesar neatly got around the distaste for monarchy: it was originally a personal name, but had come to denote the Princeps.

Imperator might be a good term to use as it sounds suitably Roman

Imperator was a republican military victory title, adopted by the emperors as their own property. I'm not sure at what point it became usual to address or refer to an emperor in this way (Fergus Millar's The Emperor in the Roman World is probably the book to check - dense but brilliant).

I think addressing the emperor as Caesar would have been more common in the earlier centuries (except, it seems, by soldiers, who may have preferred the martial association of the alternative title - the militarisation of the Roman state in the later third century might have caused the shift, perhaps?).

Dominus is probably the most accurate, but I have always associated this with the way a slave would address a master rather than a free citizen addressing another citizen. To me, it comes cross as a little subservient for a Roman.

It might sound that way to us, and of course it was indeed the way that slaves addressed their masters, but it does seem to have had a wider application. Soldiers seem to have used it to their commanding officers, for example. The Vindolanda tablets have soldiers addressing their commander in this way.

But it wasn't necessarily subservient - one officer addresses his friend as 'domine frater' ('Master and brother'), which just underlines that this word was a lot more flexible that its common English translation would imply!

There have been a few discussions of this over the years. These two are quite detailed:

Forms of verbal address

Language