ABSTRACT
The prevalent view in the study of Late Antiquity holds that the years 300 to 600 CE witnessed a decay in civic benefaction and its replacement by Christian charity, while a specific category of “the poor” was defined as the privileged beneficiaries of this gift. Christian preaching on charity and poverty gave African peasants the very elements that helped them to express discontent and rebellion. And this is because they appropriated and actively reinterpreted the prevailing discourse on poverty and charity according to their own experiences and needs. North Africa is, out of all regions of the Roman West, the one that maintained ancient civic traditions and the classical form of urban planning for the longest. Although North African cities lost many of their resources, part of their autonomy in the fourth and early fifth centuries, they continued to maintain a vibrant municipal life, at least until the Vandal conquest.
