In the following areas, the project will yield significant progress beyond the state-of-the-art:
There is no decent edition of the full constitutions. This lack of a serious edition explains why the evidence from the full constitutions is so little used. This ERC project will create a comprehensive edition with translation and commentary of the full constitutions from Late Antiquity.
Available translations of late antique full constitutions and law codes are quite often just as difficult to understand as the Latin originals themselves. Apparently, translators could not grasp the meaning of the source language and therefore chose to render the contents »literally« (which here results in »wrongly«, as the underlying idea is not transported into the target language by rendering it according to such a crude approach). Publications on the grammar and vocabulary of the full constitutions will facilitate their understanding.
Legislation until the third century exclusively happened in Latin, whereas at some point during the reign of Justinian Greek finally prevailed. In between, the situation was flexible and remains for now unclear. We have a small sample of constitutions in both Latin and Greek. Both versions are idiomatic, meaning that it is not easy to ascertain which version is the original. Hence, this will give us great insight into late antique translation techniques.
So far, work on the full constitutions in their communicative function is unsatisfactory. For many reasons, their content cannot be regarded as “propaganda,” except if we apply a simplistic definition of propaganda. Hence, in which way were they actually used?
