Municipia

Some indigenous communities were deemed politically and culturally more advanced than others and as a result were granted the ‘‘Latin rights’’ of citizenship (the iusLatii, Latium, or Latinitas), and occasionally municipal status. (In some cases it provided Augustus with a means of rewarding a community that had remained loyal to him during the civil wars.) Some scholars have argued that the grant of the Latin rights brought with it automatic promotion to municipal status, but a more nuanced reading ofthe sources suggests that communities that were not municipia could still hold the iusLatii (Sherwin-White 1973: 360-79; Le Roux 1986). A community’s promotion to the status of a ‘‘municipality of the Latin rights’’ ( municipium iuris Latii or iuris Latini) was confirmed by means of a formal statute of the Roman people (a lexpopuli Romani), which resulted in its citizens becoming ‘‘Latin citizens’’ (cives Latini). This is the natural implication of the reference to Latini in two clauses of the municipal charter granted to Irni under Domitian (Lex Irnitana 28 and 72), which in retrospect excludes Fergus Millar’s self-admittedly heretical suggestion that the category of cives Latini never existed (Millar 1977: 630-5; cf. 2004: 342, n. 13). Occasionally a community contained enough Roman citizens to merit the status of a ‘‘municipality of Roman citizens’’ ( municipium civium Romanorum), as occurred at Olisipo (Lisbon) by the Augustan period (Plin. Nat. 4.117), and at Volubilis in Mauretania Tingitana, which gained this status from Claudius after the city had provided troops in 40-41 CE to help put down the revolt of Aedemon, freedman of the recently deceased King Ptolemy of Mauretania (ILAfr 634 = FIRA170, tr. Sherk 1988 no. 50).

The promotion of native communities to the Latin rights and then to municipal status was an ongoing process, occurring at different moments in different regions of the Roman west. A few communities in southern Spain and Gallia Narbonensis had already been promoted by Julius Caesar. Many more were promoted by Augustus (Sherwin-White 1973: 225-36; Brunt 1987: 602-7). Claudius extended these grants in central Gaul, Noricum, northern Dalmatia, and Mauretania, for instance, but it was under the Flavian emperors that the process gained particular momentum. During his censorship in 73/4 Vespasian granted Latin rights to ‘‘the whole of Hispania’’ (Plin. Nat. 3.30), a blanket grant which (in my view) is best interpreted to mean that it allowed individual communities then to petition for formal bestowal of these rights and possibly also municipal status (Richardson 1996: 179-230). The bronze plaques that survive from Salpensa, Malaca, and, most fully, from Irni in Baetica with the texts of the statute of the Roman people (lexpopuli Romani) granting their municipal status were the products of the successful application of each of these communities for promotion. In north Africa the Flavian period also saw some promotions in status of communities - this was when Lepcis Magna, for instance, gained the ius Latii - but the largest number of grants of municipal status occurred during the second and early third centuries ce (Jacques 1972; for Hadrian’s contribution, see Boatwright 2000: 36-56).

Such promotions required an influential member of the local elite to lobby the Roman emperor. During the reign of Antoninus Pius, the city of Gigthis (Bou Ghara) in the eastern part of Africa Proconsularis known as Tripolitania (D. J. Mattingly 1994: 128-31) successfully petitioned the emperor for the status of a municipium Latii maioris (i. e., the much rarer form of Latin rights whereby not just the magistrates but the entire local senate received Roman citizenship). As a result, the local senate honored the city’s envoy, a Roman citizen who had held the senior magistracy and a priesthood in the community, with a statue to commemorate the hard work he had put in and the financial contribution he had made in funding his embassies, as the inscription on the statue-base made clear:

In honour of Marcus Servilius Draco Albucianus, son of Publius, of the (Roman voting tribe) Quirina, duovir, flamen in perpetuity, because in addition to his numerous good deeds towards the community and his very expansive zeal for munificence he undertook at his own expense two embassies to the city of Rome to petition for the major Latin rights (Latium maius). When at last he reported on the success of his mission, the order (i. e., local senate) voted to erect (this statue) in his honour at public expense. And when he, pleased with the honour, returned the money to the community, the local citizen body (populus) set it up on its own initiative. {ILS 6780)