Ceti dirigenti e religione in età tardoantica: il contributo di Guido Clemente

This brief paper focuses on a number of essays that appear in the new edition of Guido Clemente’s mono- graph on the Notitia Dignitatum, particularly those dealing with the relationship between politics and religion. The author wanted them to be published together with others on ad- ministrative topics, in the section entitled Late Antiquity and its Ruling Elites, indicating how research on the culture of a society was inseparable and deeply connected, in his perspective, with the study of its institutional structures, such as the formation of careers and the creation of provinces, or dioceses, and other related issues. Examined separately, the contributions devoted to culture and religion appear to address two main themes. The first concerns the religious question in the late empire and is developed as an examination of the Christianisa- tion of elites especially from Constantine through the fourth century AD. The other, suggested by the reading of some relevant documents of the Collectio Avellana, relates to the role of the senate in relation to religious matters in the three central centuries of Late Antiquity, when the dramatic change in the attitude of its members towards religion also modified the religious policy of the Roman assembly, in its twofold dimension of local and at the same time inter- national politics.