Conscience de la crise, groupements de pression, idéologie du beneficium

This study aims at describing significant aspects of the late Roman public administration at work, and interpreting in terms of a holistic pattern the relations between theory (principles which ruled the legal institutions; social expectancies) and governmental practice (decisional processes and their actors; enforcement of the actual legislation and its fluctuations). More attention has been given to the western situation during the IVth and Vth centuries, but useful elements of comparison and additional information have been equally drawn from the protobyzantine context. Central to the enquiry is the piling up of those causes that obstructed – to the point where they became unfeasible – reforms that would have been radical enough to improve the efficiency of the public policies, whose inadequacy was discerned by significant areas of the then existing society, to begin with the repercussions which could be ascertained in the assessment of fiscal duties. As much with regard to the criteria for selecting officials as, essentially, on the grounds of growing grants of immunity, exemptions, privileges of all kinds to individuals and to whole categories, the Roman system suffered from tensions, short circuits, and was eventually deadlocked, notwithstanding some credible attempts at overture, mainly visible at some stages of Valentinian III’s reign. The symptoms of a Reformstau, a phenomenon of significant implication for deciphering administrative history (including the late antique one), which eventually had repercussions on a social system yet seriously affected by economic and organizational difficulties, showed itself in – and becomes understandable by – the dynamics of political power allotment, taking into account, on the one hand, the role played by the lobbies interested in defending established rights, on the other hand, the plethora of state apparatuses out of proportion with collective possibilities – and perhaps even necessities –, and, lastly, the limits dictated by widespread mental structures, among which the imperial “beneficial ideology”

Archaeology · Conscience · Context (archaeology · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Reign · Sociology · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Studies and Legal History · History · Law

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