they worked to dismantle the civic framework that almost undoubtedly had made
that cult meaningful.
The cults of Fregellae thus constitute an extreme variant upon what the second-
centuryad lexicographer Festus calls municipalia sacra, “municipal rites”: “Those
sacraare called municipaliawhich a people had from its origin, before receiving
Roman citizenship, and which the pontificeswanted them to continue to observe
and perform in the way in which they had been accustomed to perform them
from antiquity” (Festus 146 L). Festus here as elsewhere draws upon the historical
and taxonomic efforts of late republican and Augustan scholars, notably Marcus
Terentius Varro and Verrius Flaccus. Bracketing for the moment changes in their
ideological and intellectual contexts, their efforts are united by a desire to render
the vast and variegated data of Roman religious history comprehensible. The respect
accorded to non-Roman cults in a new, Roman context – a context framed by the
presence of citizens but not by some extension of the Roman state – is thus notable.
It suggests the convergence of two quite different histories, one in which foreign
cultural practices were domesticated through their inclusion in the norms of Roman
law, and another in which imperial expansion forced a broadening in Rome’s own
cultural and anthropological awareness (Ando forthcoming a: ch. 6).
As we move out to the provinces and forward to the principate, we must recall
the significant differences in the legal framework that shaped the development
of provincial municipalities under the principate in contradistinction to that of
the municipalities of Italy in the years after the Social War. Most importantly, the
municipalities of the empire were not composed exclusively of citizens. Rather, the
communities had what was known as “Latin status,” which meant above all that their
magistrates obtained Roman citizenship upon their departure from office. What is
more, significant grants of municipal status to provincial cities began only under the
principate. In other words, it followed upon the theoretical and historical work of
Roman intellectuals and jurists of the late republic. It therefore represents, if any-
thing, a self-aware development not so much upon historical practice in Roman Italy
as upon the particular understandings of that practice achieved in the latter half of
the first century bc.
With that caution in mind, let us turn to the provinces. There we find, in addi-
tion to a host of evidence in the form of dedications, titles of priests, and the like,
one remarkably well-preserved normative text, namely, the lex Flavia municipalis–
a municipal charter drafted at Rome for the cities of Spain, to which area in its entirety
Vespasian granted Latin status (fragments have been located in several cities;
González 1986 provides a composite text and translation, of which Galsterer 1988
provides a useful overview). Any cities therein that had previously been alien and
tributary were thus raised to municipal status. But the imposition of a uniform char-
ter in itself draws attention to the paradoxical and limited nature of the autonomy
that in the public law tradition remembered by Gellius had been the municipality’s
distinctive characteristic. For as the empire grew and interactions between Romans
and aliens increased exponentially, it became more and more in the central gov-
ernment’s interest to standardize the scope and, indeed, the particulars of local
autonomy. As a result, the range of issues in both public and civil law left to local
438 Clifford Ando