Augures et pontifices: Public Sacral Law in Late Antique Rome (Fourth–Fifth Centuries AD)

This article deals with an aspect of late antique religion which is usually associated with impotence rather than power: the traditional state cults of Rome. It examines two of the four amplissima collegia of ancient Rome, that is the collegium pontificum and the collegium augurum, and asks specifically whether these continued to exercise a public function during the fourth and into the fifth centuries, a period that is conventionally associated with the inexorable Christianization of the city’s religious institutions.