Potestas populi

Résumé éditeur

Compared to the scholarly interest on popular politics in Classical Greece or Republican Rome, the study of the urban plebs of the Later Roman Empire has been remarkably neglected, despite the recurrent discussions about urban violence in the period. This book is an attempt to reverse this situation for the particular context of the North African provinces, from the beginning of the fourth century to the Vandal conquest. Its main objective is to understand the forms and conditions of popular participation and collective action in the cities of North Africa, by placing them in the broader context of economic activities, social relations, and cultural traditions of the plebs. In order to explore the logic inherent in each crowd action, the author analyses a number of episodes of popular intervention revealed by 4th- and 5th-centuries ecclesiastical sources, and particularly by the sermons and letters of Saint Augustine