Politics of style

MacMullen again, on the style of late Roman communications (written in purple ink): “It was extremely conscious, the late descendant of centuries of rhetorical art, marked by many poetical tricks: avoidance of hiatus or of inelegant words; metrical terminations of sentences and clauses; variation through an apparently limitless vocabulary of periphrasis. The least note of of anything politically embarrassing disappeared in Brahmsian harmonies; aimlessly rich orchestration obscured the theme, if any; inauspicious rich orchestration piped in vain against the drumrolls of hyperbole. And when he was addressed in turn, the emperor heard the same sort of language. Anything else would have been very bad manners, verging on lese majeste .” Obviously, one of the effects of this was to screen the emperor from much of the truth of what was going on in his realm.