Banished from the Company of the Good. Christians and Aliens in Fifth-Century Rome

Abstract

This article studies Latin civic discourse in relation to the politicaland legal concepts of the citizen and citizenship, andconcentrates on the influence of Christianity on the developmentof this discourse in late-imperial Rome. While the concepts ofcivisandcivitasgradually lost their political and legal value, the ancientLatin vocabulary in which these concepts are expressed did notdisappear but acquired new contextual meaning and situationalapplication. We will present this development in fourth- andfifth-century Rome by discussing two different yet closely relatedcorpora of source texts, comparing the pastoral-theologicalsermons of the Roman bishop Leo I (440–461) with the imperiallaws collected in the Theodosian Code. The juxtaposition of thesecorpora shows a striking similarity in the Christian appropriationof civic discourse, serving to develop and express new, religiouslyfounded forms of belonging to as well as exclusion from the civiccommunity in city and empire.