Istituzioni curiali e amministrazione della città nell'Italia ostrogota e bizantina

Abstract

It is largely acknowledged by scholars that the decline of the municipal councils was one of the factors that would have marked - with negative consequences - the life of the Late Antique city. An analysis of the sources from the second half of the fifth to the beginning of the sixth century suggests two tendencies that seem to be in contradiction with each other at first sight. On the one hand, the posts of greater political and managerial responsibility for municipal self-government (the curator, the defensor and, in the East, the patēr tēs poleōs) are held by individuals who are not directly appointed by the councils; on the other hand, the presence of councilors in the social landscape of the Italian cities during the period in question is still very relevant. The contradiction, however, is only ostensible when one reflects on what were the real functions of the decurions in Ostrogothic and early Byzantine Italy, namely 1/the preservation in the municipal archives of the legal transactions carried out in the city district, and 2/the division among its inhabitants of the tax burden. These two functions were far from marginal, so much so that the Pragmatica sanctio pro petitione Vigilii intervened to alleviate the responsibility of the decurions in carrying out the second. In their activity, the decurions acquired administrative skills that, in some cases, as in Ravenna, churches used to their advantage by recruiting former members of the curiae into their own personnel. The curiae continued to have a longer existence in those Italian regions, such as Sicily, in which the role of the central power was stronger, since the latter acted as an instrument of their protection, not the opposite. The disappearance of the Praetorian prefecture in Italy, between 639 and 685, implied the collapse of the whole Late Roman administrative system in which municipal institutions were inserted. The curiae did not cease to operate when their members lost their role as urban patrons, nor when they ceased to represent a true local ruling class, but when they were no longer able to perform those procedures that constituted the essence of the Late Roman municipal tradition, by ensuring an institutional link between the city, as well as its territory and between the city and the empire.