Potestas Populi

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. These case studies are preceded by a more general analysis of the textual and archaeological evidence on the formative experiences of the plebeian life: work, dwelling conditions, and networks of sociability. This wider context is intended to furnish a better understanding of the bases on which the members of the urban plebs could establish relations of group solidarity and cultivate a political culture that prescribed and legitimized their forms of collective action.Julio Cesar Magalhaes de Oliveira was born June 10, 1977 at Pocos de Caldas, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He completed his Bachelor and Masters in History in the Brazilian University of Campinas (Sao Paulo state), before continuing his thesis research in France from 2002 to 2006. He has a doctorate in history and archeology of the ancient worlds of the University Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense. He is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Londrina (Paranstate, Brazil).