La législation impériale sur les gouvernements municipaux dans l'Antiquité tardive

• Autores: Jean-Michel Carrié
• Localización: Antiquité tardive: revue internationale d'histoire et d'archéologie, ISSN 1250-7334, Nº. 26, 2018 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Le gouvernement des cités dans l’Antiquité tardive (IVe-VIIIe siècles)), págs. 85-125
• Idioma: francés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • At risk of being unable to encompass the huge, scattered legislative production on western cities and city councils which has been preserved for Late Antiquity, the present issue deliberately focused on the context of enunciation of the legal texts, choosing those concerned by municipal government as a testing ground. In particular, the fact that very frequently texts which were given universal validity as leges genarales by the Theodosian Code were originally issued as rescripts or parts of mandata radically changes our vision of the history of mutual relations between the Empire and cities. When put in such a perspective, those texts help to specify the limits in which the central power interfered with the autonomy of late Roman civic institutions and structures.

    Whether curials fled to the army, higher state bureaucracy, provincial offices or the Christian Church, the emperors unfailingly adopt the same doctrine: the absolute regard towards the eminent rights of the cities should result in returning any defector to the city council. Such a principle would have dried up the recruitment of state officials unless city councils had not, as it frequently happened, neglected their claim on fugitive members.

    A whole side of the laws on the municipal government regards the civic munera, i.e. obligations of decurions, corpora and rich enough privates designated for fulfilling public services, some needed by the city, others by the imperial government. Those public services privately provided include: registry office, land registry, public fiscal system, military enlistment (praebitio tironum), compulsory transportation and cursus publicus, police and justice, and hospitium.

    Another sector of this legislation regards the relations between the cities and the agents of imperial power (palatine scrinia, governors) in situations where the imperial law interferes with the inner life of the cities. A significant part of the imperial legislation aims at giving assistance to the cities in defence of their councils, of municipal lands. The long debated and much frustrating question of the confiscation for the benefit of the imperial finances of the cities'revenues drawn from their landed and real estate may well have found its final solution.

    Religious matters are par excellence fields of intervention or interference of the imperial law against the autonomy of the cities. The Christian emperors edicted restrictive laws about the exemption of clerics from municipal duties and the admission of curials in the Church. Similar rules were laid for hebraic priests