Abstract

This article studies Latin civic discourse in relation to the political and legal concepts of the citizen and citizenship, and concentrates on the influence of Christianity on the development of this discourse in late-imperial Rome. While the concepts of civis and civitas gradually lost their political and legal value, the ancient Latin vocabulary in which these concepts are expressed did not disappear but acquired new contextual meaning and situational application. We will present this development in fourth- and fifth-century Rome by discussing two different yet closely related corpora of source texts, comparing the pastoral-theological sermons of the Roman bishop Leo I (440–461) with the imperial laws collected in the Theodosian Code. The juxtaposition of these corpora shows a striking similarity in the Christian appropriation of civic discourse, serving to develop and express new, religiously founded forms of belonging to as well as exclusion from the civic community in city and empire.