Power and influence. Personal Influence on the Rulers of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

在独裁政权中，那些能够影响统治者的决定和意见的人拥有巨大的权力，这一事实引发了竞争和谣言。这种明显但在很大程度上被忽视的相关性在古代晚期得到了最好的研究，当时重要的影响条件受到政治、社会和知识变革的影响。在移民时期导致罗马帝国分裂之后，皇帝继续存在于拜占庭东部。在西方，日耳曼国王兴起。从与皇帝关系密切的朝廷太监，到因基督教的兴起而获得权力的主教，许多代理人都试图听取统治者的意见。因此，这些不同的代理人之间存在着激烈的竞争，这导致了冲突，并促进了论战文学。通常是占统治地位的人的意见创造了历史。那些对统治者施加影响的主角还没有被彻底调查，因为他们组成了一个异质的群体，既不能从制度上完全理解，也不能从他们与皇帝的亲近程度上把握。此外，他们的手段不仅包括语言，还包括手势。有偏见的来源，其中影响主体是基于角色榜样（警告者或诱惑者），对信仰（如宗教）的影响及其在叙事中的表现（好国王/坏顾问），要么被学术界视为理所当然，要么被完全拒绝。最后，无论是古典文学还是中世纪历史，都没有研究人际影响的传统。本项目采用社会心理学家Bertram Raven的人际影响的权力/互动模型，旨在分析影响主体的资源和策略，以及影响尝试的模式和条件，从而绕过通常塑造或塑造对影响的理解的常见对立，如男性/女性，异教徒/基督徒，罗马人/日耳曼人。同时，用话语分析的工具来审视主体和互动的表征。通过对历史主体、文学人物和社会刻板印象之间的相互关系进行新的阐释，有可能区分真实的和感知的权力转移。子项目的时间和地理分布（284- 395,395 -565 East, 395-568 West）是为了突出影响及其话语如何与上述转变相关联，从而说明其历史和文化维度。该项目的目标是将人际影响作为历史研究的一个主题，并通过分析对统治者的影响，为政治史和思想史做出贡献。

The fact that in autocratic regimes, those who manage to influence the decisions and opinions of rulers enjoy great power, stirs up rivalry and rumors. This evident but largely neglected correlation is best studied in the case of late antiquity, when important conditions of influence were subject to political, social and intellectual change. After the Migration Period caused the Roman Empire to split up, emperors continued to exist in the byzantine East. In the West, Germanic kings arose. Many agents tried to have the ear of the ruler: from court eunuchs, who were very close to the emperors, to bishops, who were enabled by the rise of Christianity. As a consequence, there was bitter rivalry between these various agents, which led to conflicts and promoted polemic literature. It was usually the opinion of the prevailing one which made history.Those protagonists who exerted influence on rulers have not been investigated thoroughly yet, as they formed a heterogeneous group of people that can neither be entirely understood in terms of institutions nor grasped by their proximity to the emperor. Furthermore, their means not only comprised words, but also gestures. Biased sources, in which influencing agents are based on role models (warner or temptress), influence on beliefs (like religion) and its representation on narratives (good king/ bad advisor), have either been taken for granted by scholarship or wholly rejected. Finally, neither in Classics nor in Medieval History is there a tradition of studying interpersonal influence.This project, by employing the Power/Interaction Model of Interpersonal Influence by social psychologist Bertram Raven, aims to analyse the resources and strategies of influencing agents as well as the modes and conditions of influence attempts, bypassing thereby common oppositions, which often shape or shaped the understanding of influence, like male/ female, pagan/ Christian, roman/ Germanic. At the same time, representations of agents and interactions are to be scrutinized with the instruments of discourse analysis. By casting new light on the interrelation of historical agent, literary figure and social stereotype, it is possible to distinguish between real and perceived power-shifts. The chronological and geographical disposition of the sub-projects (284-395, 395-565 East, 395-568 West) is to highlight how influence and its discourse correlate with the aforementioned shifts, thereby illustrating their historical and cultural dimension. The goal of the project is to establish interpersonal influence as a subject of historical research and to make a contribution towards political history as well as the history of mentalities by analyzing influence on rulers.