Lukas Lemcke challenges the conventional understanding of the Late Roman administration as a
three-tiered system by demonstrating that its hierarchy of communication was distinctly
two-tiered. In so doing he offers a new perspective on the functional and organizational
structure of this administrative system and advances our understanding of the vicariate by
introducing a new functional dimension and by reassessing its development during the fifth and
early sixth centuries. Based on a comprehensive collection of legal epigraphic and other
literary documents to which the concept of formal communication is applied the author explores
the forms and development of administrative communication channels that facilitated the
official exchange of information from Constantine to Justinian and thus reveals how emperors
actively sought to regulate the centripetal and centrifugal flow of official information.
