Religio Licita: Empire, Religion, and Civic Subjects, 250-450 CE
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Lenski, Noel
Abstract
Beginning in the third century CE, the Roman Empire witnessed a notable increase in the number of laws that aimed to regulate religious ideas and practices among its subjects. This unprecedented boom in religious lawmaking underscores a growing imperial concern with getting religion right, a concern that eventually produced several hundred imperial constitutions concerning religion that were included in the fifth-century Theodosian Code. This dissertation seeks to explain this explosion of laws about religion in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE as well as their consequences for the empire’s subjects. By emphasizing the ways these edicts and decrees transformed Roman civil law, this dissertation links the integration of religious ideals into Roman legal culture with the promulgation of the Constitutio Antoniniana, a near-universal grant of citizenship in 212 CE. Before then, restricted access to Roman citizenship—and to the rights attached thereto—had articulated and perpetuated various social and legal hierarchies by restricting access to Roman civil law. When the constitutio flattened many of those hierarchies and threatened the variegated access to the legal privilege they provided, imperial rulers turned to other ideological principles to produce and sustain those social and legal hierarchies. In particular, adherence to or deviation from what I call the “discourse of normative religion”—the idea that certain forms of religious belief and practice were more acceptable or desirable than others—became a normative classification scheme that defined, determined, and demarcated subjects’ access to various rights and privileges, such as one’s legal personality, the right to own property, or recourse to certain judicial procedures. While many scholars have noted the increased frequency of religious legislation and others have studied the consequences of the constitutio Antoniniana’s radical expansion of Roman citizenship, this dissertation explicitly links these two phenomena. To make this argument, Religio Licita traces these transformations in Roman civil law through three overlapping areas of Roman jurisprudence. Part I explores the relationship between normative religious ideals and the law of persons, which governed questions of legal personality and standing within the social, civic, and legal order. In Part II, this dissertation shows how the late Roman state used laws about property and property ownership (i.e., the law of things) to transform the material lives of the empire’s subjects. Finally, Part III examines the transformations in legal procedure due to the influence of the normative religious discourse. In all three cases, I show how religion transformed these aspects of Roman law, how the law was used to promote and enforce certain ideas about religion, and what those changes meant for the late Roman empire’s civic subjects.
Recommended Citation
Rice, Carl Ross, "Religio Licita: Empire, Religion, and Civic Subjects, 250-450 CE" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1086.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1086
