Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1975

Publication Title

Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Volume

17

Pages

237-250

Publisher Name

Dr. Rudolf Habelt Ltd.

Abstract

Until recently, the Later Roman Empire was commonly judged to have been an age of severely restricted social mobility. Many individuals were bound to remain for life in their places of origin; others were compelled to take up their fathers' occupations or to perform services incumbent upon them by heredity. The traditional view, drawn largely from the evidence of the great imperial law codes, received its first broad challenge from Professor A. H.M.Jones, who on several occasions argued that society under the late Empire was actually more fluid than generally believed, even more mobile than it had been under the Princip?te. The laws, often repeating the same restrictions, and these sanctioned by increasingly harsh penalties, were witness to the weakness and frustration of the central government, not to its effectiveness in coercing and controlling its subjects. Nor was the restrictive legislation of the Codes as universal in application as usually supposed. Moreover, casual examples from contemporary literature, together with concessions made in the laws themselves, showed that the laws limiting mobility were often dodged and violated with impunity.

Comments

Author Posting. © Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn, 1975. This article is posted here by permission of Verlag Rudolf Habelt for personal use, not for redistribution. It was published in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 17 (1975). http://ifa.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/zpe.html

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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