This PhD dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive study of the use and role of consular dating formulas in Late Antiquity, focusing especially on the period from AD 476 to 541.Its ultimate goal is to explore whether evidence for the dissemination and non-dissemination of consular dates can legitimately be used to address specific historical issues. Exhaustive investigation has established several strong correlations between political factors and the inclusion or exclusion of consular names within annual dating formulas employed in the eastern and western halves of the Empire. These suggest that consular dating potentially provides a new high-resolution and non-literature-based proxy variable that stands in both for official political stances of the Roman imperial government and expressions of provincial loyalty. This project argues that a full understanding of dissemination patterns and the factors affecting dissemination opens up new perspectives which offer new insight into the partially lost diplomatic history of Western Europe, north Africa and the Near East in the era before Justinian’s wars of reconquest.
