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Among the comital elites of the early 11th century mentioned in the documentation for the Rome area, the counts of Galeria occupied a prominent place. Though we can reconstruct their history until the second half of the 13th century, not all the individuals who held this title were of the same lineage. Count Gerardo [I], son of Ranieri, is the most important figure of all the Counts of Galeria, and therefore the main focus of this paper. He is documented between 1040–1060 and played an important role in Rome’s political history during these years. He collaborated with Popes Benedict IX and Benedict X; he played a leading role in the Roman Tuscia where he also owned several castles, and was a close ally of the abbots of Farfa. Count Sassone of Civita Castellana was his brother. Both men had descendants. It is very likely that after Count Gerardo’s death, in the early 1060s Galeria Castle returned under papal control. According to a document in the archives of San Paolo fuori le mura, Gregory VII granted it to the monastery in Via Ostiense. By contrast, the descendants of Count Sassone, his son Rainieri [II] and his grandson Sassone [II], managed to retain control of Civita Castellana until almost the end of the century. Our information on this family ceases in the last 20 years of the 11th century. At the end of the first millennium, other Roman families began to appear in the Roman contado and the southern Tuscia, and in the space of a century their ambitions obliterated the old families that had hitherto dominated. Other counts of Galeria appear sporadically in the documents of the 12th and 13th centuries, but none of these individuals were as important as the two brothers Gerardo [I] and Sassone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the issue of how tradition intermingles with the innovative politics and ruling system of the Diocletianic tetrarchy. It focuses on the formative as well as on the dramatic, performative aspects of the past. The different modes of dealing with Roman history are to be shown by examples from four major classes of evidence: the monumental (Arch of Constantine), epigraphic, papyrological and rhetorical documents of the Later Roman Empire. Particularly the staged aspects of social interactions as reflected in this material turn out to be an obstacle for any change. Though concordia of the four emperors was omnipresent in tetrarchic propaganda, an inscription from the Egyptian island of Elephantine and a series of papyri from the Panopolite archive of the scholastikos Ammon show that interaction between individuals and the "local" Augustus remained in the field of personal face-to-face relationships. Its main characteristics can be grasped in stylized forms of gift exchange spanning occasionally many generations of a family and thus being part of the individual memoria: imperial letters are but reifications of that common history. In this way, Ammon's brother, the rhetor Harpokration, contributes with his pronouncing basilikoi logoi at the court of Diocletian to maintaining the status of his family as members of the local elite by imperial appointment to priesthood. His rhetorical gift to the emperor was an utterly valuable one: late antique panegyrics were strongly bound to tradition trying to inscribe the present into glorious Roman past, thereby naturalizing new forms of rule. But an analysis of Panegyricus Latinus X (AD 289) shows the difficulties and risks faced by rhetors thriving to find analogies to the dyarchic system in the days of Rome's beginnings. Constantine did much better in amalgamating traditional and innovating elements into a cogent display of power when celebrating his decennalia in the metropolis. His arch succeeded in formulating autocracy in a new code out of traditional elements, inserting his claim into a framework of well accepted signs and rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]