This chapter examines the place within the court of the imperial secretaries and the workers in their bureaux. It first considers social connections between the servile workers in the bureaux and court domestic staff. Following this, the major imperial secretaryships are examined: the offices of ab epistulis, a libellis, a cognitionibus, a commentariis, a memoria, a studiis, a censibus, and a rationibus, as well as their late third-century equivalents. Some individuals holding these offices demonstrably had close relationships with the emperor or courtiers. But we lack the evidence to conclude that the secretaries and their bureaux formed an ‘outer court’ with a clear spatial relationship with the emperor’s domestic realm, or that they had an institutionalized pattern of social or professional contacts with that realm. The chapter also examines the structural relationship between the court and the imperial treasuries (the aerarium and fiscus), highlighting the reciprocal flow of funds.

Unlike many other monarchical courts in history, the Roman imperial court had no distinctive form of dress for courtiers. But dress, jewellery, and the presentation of the body were still important in the world of the court. The clothed, adorned, and groomed body was a crucial instrument of communication within court society. In the case of the emperor and his family especially, the clothed body and its presentation also communicated with the rest of society; the considerable inscriptional evidence for staff in the imperial household with tasks involving clothing, jewellery, or grooming hints at the message of magnificence often being conveyed. Magnificence was, however, a two-edged sword. The ancient literary sources display clear traces of moralizing discourses that sought to pressure the emperor into what were considered to be appropriate sartorial decisions.