Constitutio Antoniniana

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When constitutio antoniniana is one of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus, called Caracalla , probably came into force on July 11, 212 regulation with which the rulers all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire , the Roman citizenship conferred. A reservation was only made with regard to one group, the dediticii . Part of the text is preserved on a papyrus that has been preserved in a pouring mold .

Source location and content

A constitution (Latin for ordinance ) is an imperial order in the form of an edict , decree , mandate or rescript , which - alongside the resolutions of the Senate - became the central form of legislation in the Roman Empire . The papal counterpart to this is the Constitutio Apostolica ( Apostolic Establishment ).

A part of the text is believed to have been rediscovered on a papyrus that dates from around 215, was acquired in 1901 in Eschmunen , Egypt and is now in the papyrus collection of the Giessen University Library (P. Giss. 40, col. I) to have. End of October 2017 was the piece in the list of world cultural heritage of UNESCO added. However, the interpretation of the content of the preserved passages is still controversial. The text in this papyrus reads:

"Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Pius says: After I have received requests and petitions asking, above all, how I can thank the immortal gods for saving me through such a victory, it is reasonable to say, that I am of the opinion that I can carry out an act in such a grand and pious way as Her Majesty should, by bringing the strangers together in the ceremonies of their faith, like Romans, all who come and unite them with my men. I therefore give the right of a Roman citizen to all foreigners who are in the kingdom, including those who reside in cities of any kind, except those who are dediticii . Really, it should be that from now on the crowd also shares in the victory. This edict will increase the dignity of the Roman people. "

The delimitation of the group of people meant by dediticii is not clearly clarified . As dediticii one usually referred to members of peoples or states who had unconditionally submitted to the Romans, either in war in the sense of a surrender or in peace in order to receive Roman protection. In legal terms, the Constitutio Antoniniana did not mean, as was previously believed, the abolition of local legal customs and their replacement by private Roman law ; Local law continued to be applied insofar as it did not contradict Roman law.

In later times it was mostly no longer Caracalla, but Mark Aurel or Antoninus Pius that was considered the emperor who had issued the Constitutio Antoniniana . Like him, both bore the name Antoninus , but in contrast to Caracalla, they were remembered as positive. Modern historians occasionally questioned the dating to the year 212 and put the Constitutio in the following two years, but mostly the traditional argument is accepted: Already at the beginning of the year 213 appeared in several places of the Roman Empire - in Lycia and Germania - reinforces the gentile name Aurelius , which probably has to do with the fact that the new citizens often named themselves after Caracalla to thank him and to honor him.

Motifs of Caracallas

The sense and purpose of the decree have not yet been satisfactorily clarified. In the preamble of the edict, the occasion is emphasized, which consisted in the fact that the emperor had been saved (this is probably a reference to an alleged murder plan of his brother Geta , who was slain by Caracalla in December 211), and thus as many subjects as possible could thank the Roman gods for the “salvation” Caracallas had decided to include them in the circle of the citizens of Rome. This will only have been an excuse, which was supposed to have the desired side effect of getting Geta badmouthed. According to many researchers, the real background to the extremely drastic measure was different.

The historian Cassius Dio , who was hostile to Caracalla, shares (79,9,5) how the emperor's step was perceived in opposition circles. It was believed there that the main purpose of extending civil rights was to subject those affected to various taxes that were only payable by Roman citizens. These included the tax on the release of slaves and the inheritance tax, which Caracalla doubled. Inheritance tax has now also been imposed on family members who were previously not taxable. Because of the extraordinarily high personnel costs in the military as a result of a generous increase in pay and generous donations to the soldiers, Caracalla actually had to develop new sources of income. However, it is controversial in modern research to what extent Cassius Dios' assertion is true, because Roman citizens were for their part exempt from many taxes that only non-Romans had to pay.

In any case, the increase in tax revenue could have been at most one of Caracalla's motives. It should be noted that the conflict with Geta claimed numerous lives, severely damaged its reputation and shook its position. Presumably he wanted to win the new citizens as personally devoted loyal supporters in order to compensate in this way the enmity of the traditional elite, among whom he was hated, and thus to strengthen his power base. Numerous new citizens adopted the emperor's gentile name, Aurelius , which became extremely common as a result. All in all, the measure of 212 probably boiled down to filling the coffers of the state and the emperor and giving Caracalla popularity and loyal supporters in a crisis situation.

Effects and historical classification

Even if the measure was due to a specific crisis situation: With the Constitutio Antoniniana , Caracalla took an important step towards standardizing the legal relationships in the empire. The measure reflects a development that affected the social stratification of the population. At the time of Augustus (27 BC to 14 AD) there were basically a number of privileges (in particular the exemption from certain taxes) and protections for Roman citizens, regardless of their social rank. However, in the two and a half centuries that followed, two decisive changes emerged:

  1. Roman citizenship was gradually extended to persons throughout the empire, both through individual permits (in particular towards dismissed auxiliary troops; see military diploma ) and towards entire communities (such as Leptis Magna or Cologne ). The children of freed slaves of a Roman citizen also automatically had Roman citizenship. This meant that a large and growing number of ordinary people of foreign origin enjoyed the protection of Roman citizenship (compare: Paul in the Acts of the Apostles ).
  2. The aristocracies of various non-Roman parts of the empire assimilated to a certain degree in Roman culture, and some of their members even succeeded in advancing to the Roman Senate. At the time of the Constitutio Antoniniana , on the other hand, many wealthy residents of the Roman Empire had received rights, but were still formally wealthy foreigners.

The result of this situation was that instead of the demarcation between Romans and foreigners ( peregrini ), a new distinction slowly emerged in the empire . The Roman world was divided into respected (lat. Honestiores ) and less respected (lat. Humiliores ) residents. The first group was the wealthy and active and ex-civil servants and soldiers, the other the remainder. This distinction is most evident in the penal code: normally the honestiores could only be exiled for capital crimes ( apart from high treason ), while the humiliores could be executed. This distinction is evidently mentioned for the first time under Hadrian , but the conception itself dates back to the 1st century. Thus, the Constitutio Antoniniana can be seen as the culmination of a development in which almost everyone could become a Roman citizen, since the distinction between above and below was essentially only that of social prestige.

The Constitutio Antoniniana finally completed this process: all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire now received citizenship, except for the group of "subjugated" and of course the slaves. In the eyes of some historians, this had a major impact: in the early imperial period, service in the auxiliary troops of the Roman army was often the only way for a man from the provinces who were not particularly wealthy to gain citizenship. This no longer applies and with it the distinction between legions and auxiliary troops disappeared in the medium term. Instead, men from remote regions with little romanization now served directly in the regular army and rose to the highest positions since the 4th century. Whether this, as some researchers assume, led to a “barbarization” of the army and indirectly contributed to the end of Western Rome, is very controversial in today's historical scholarship .

literature

  • Clifford Ando (Ed.): Citizenship and Empire in Europe. The Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years (= Potsdamer Classical Studies . Volume 54). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-515-11187-4 .
  • Kostas Buraselis: Theia Dorea. The divine imperial gift. Studies on the politics of the Severer and the Constitutio Antoniniana (= files of the Society for Greek and Hellenistic Legal History. Volume 18). Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-7001-3725-2 .
  • Alex Imrie: The Antonine Constitution. An Edict for the Caracallan Empire (= Impact of Empire . Volume 29). Brill, Leiden / Boston 2018, ISBN 978-90-04-36822-4 .
  • François Jaques, John Scheid : Rome and the Empire. Constitutional law, religion, army, administration, society, economy. Nikol, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-86820-012-6 , p. 307 f.
  • Barbara horse shepherd , Markus Scholz (ed.): Citizenship and crisis. The Constitutio Antoniniana 212 AD and its domestic political consequences (= mosaic stones. Research at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum. Volume 9). Book accompanying the exhibition in the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum September 20, 2012 to January 1, 2013. Verlag des Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseums, Mainz 2012, ISBN 978-3-88467-195-5 .
  • Adrian N. Sherwin-White : The Tabula of Banasa and the Constitutio Antoniniana. In: Journal of Roman Studies . Volume 63, 1973, pp. 86-98.
  • Hartmut Wolff : The constitutio Antoniniana and Papyrus Gissensis 40 I. 2 volumes, Cologne 1976 (dissertation, University of Cologne 1972).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Documents of the Auschwitz Trial and Constitutio Antoniniana are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Press release of the German UNESCO Commission of October 30, 2017, accessed on the same day.
  2. ↑ See the overview in Henning Börm : Westrom. From Honorius to Justinian . Stuttgart 2013, pp. 160ff.