La législation impériale sur les gouvernements municipaux dans l'Antiquité tardive

At risk of being unable to encompass the huge, scattered legislative production on western cities and city councils which has been preserved for Late Antiquity, the present issue deliberately focused on the context of enunciation of the legal texts, choosing those concerned by municipal government as a testing ground. In particular, the fact that very frequently texts which were given universal validity as leges genarales by the Theodosian Code were originally issued as rescripts or parts of mandata radically changes our vision of the history of mutual relations between the Empire and cities. When put in such a perspective, those texts help to specify the limits in which the central power interfered with the autonomy of late Roman civic institutions and structures.Whether curials fled to the army, higher state bureaucracy, provincial offices or the Christian Church, the emperors unfailingly adopt the same doctrine: the absolute regard towards the eminent rights of the cities should result in returning any...