Religious Authority and the Roman State

In Chapter II I traced the development of a Romano-African elite in Carthage and its territory, people who considered themselves simultaneously Roman and African. By the end of the second century CE, their African heritage was no longer seen, by themselves or others, as incompatible with their Roman identity. No one would have had to insist on the Romanitas of the emperor Septimius Severus as a century previously Statius had felt obliged to insist on the Italian culture of Severus’ grandfather. This development was by no means peculiar to Africa, but was taking place in all the provinces of the empire. What had in the time of Tiberius been an arbitrary set of cities and people, differing widely in language, culture, and political organization, had by the Severan period become much more of a political and cultural unity. In 212 CE the emperor Caracalla, the son of Septimius Severus, took the spread of Roman citizenship to its logical conclusion by extending it to all free inhabitants of the empire. As many scholars have pointed out, the legal benefits of citizenship were by that time rather slight. Yet we should not for that reason underestimate the significance of Caracalla’s decree, for in a sense it capped the transformation of the empire from a collection of disparate territories ruled by Rome into an empire of Romans.

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