Constitutio Antoniniana

''Dediticii''

The one exclusion to the universal grant occurs in a vexed passage referring to dediticii, a class of technically free people who lacked either full Roman citizenship or Latin rights. In the Imperial era, there were two categories of dediticii: the peregrini dediticii ("foreigners under treaty") who had surrendered and former slaves who were designated libertini qui dediticiorum numero sunt, freedmen who were counted among the dediticii because of a penal status that denied them the citizenship usually bestowed with manumission. The exclusion is most often taken to refer to the former slaves who had been treated as criminals by their master but for whatever reason were freed from ownership.

Analysis

The Roman jurist Ulpian ( 170223) states in the Digest: "All persons throughout the Roman world were made Roman citizens by an edict of the Emperor Antoninus Caracalla" (D. 1.5.17).

The context of the decree is still subject to discussion. According to historian and politician Cassius Dio ( AD 155 AD 235), the main reason Caracalla passed the law was to increase the number of people available to tax. In the words of Cassius Dio: "This was the reason why he made all the people in his empire Roman citizens; nominally he was honoring them, but his real purpose was to increase his revenues by this means, in as much as aliens did not have to pay most of these taxes." However, few of those that gained citizenship were wealthy, and while it is true that Rome was in a difficult financial situation, it is thought that this could not have been the sole purpose of the edict. Cassius Dio generally saw Caracalla as a bad, contemptible emperor.

Another goal may have been to increase the number of men able to serve in the legions, as only full citizens could serve as legionaries in the Roman army. In scholarly interpretations that agree with a model of moral degeneration as the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire, most famously the model followed by British historian Edward Gibbon, the edict came at a cost to the auxiliaries, which primarily consisted of non-citizen men.

In the analyses of more recent scholars, the Constitutio Antoniniana marks a major milestone in the provincialisation of Roman law, meaning that the gap between private law in the provinces and private law in Italia narrowed. This is because, in granting citizenship to all men in the provinces, much private law had to be re-written to conform with the law that applied to Roman citizens in Rome. To these scholars, it therefore also marks the beginning of a process by which imperial constitutions became the primary source of Roman law. However, a great deal of provincial law at variance with codified Roman law still held in the Roman provinces, as papyri from Egypt amply shows.

Mary Beard distinguishes the history of ancient Rome up until 212 to be different to the era that follows, "effectively a new state masquerading under an old name". Anthony Kaldellis says Rome went from an empire to a world and this decision would later underpin the enforcement of uniform religious belief.

References

References

1. Richard Lim, "Late Antiquity," in ''The Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome'' ([[Edinburgh University Press]], 2010), p. 114.
2. Besson, Arnaud. (2017-01-01). "Citizens in the Graeco-Roman World". Brill.
3. Salway, p.136{{full. (May 2024)
4. (2016). "Nomenclature and Dating in Roman Asia Minor: (M.) Aurelius/a and the 3 rd Century AD". Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
5. Herbert W. Benario, "The ''Dediticii'' of the ''Constitutio Antoniniana''," pp. 188–189, 191.
6. [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/78*.html Cassius Dio, ''Roman History'', book 78, chapter 9.]
7. (2013). "New Frontiers: Law and Society in the Roman". Edinburgh University Press.
8. Kaiser, Wolfgang. (2006). "Volksrecht". Brill.
9. (2015). "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome". Profile.
10. (2024). "The New Roman Empire".