RICERCHE SULLA LEGISLAZIONE DI ONORIO

Emperor Honorius has not received much attention from historiography, which has often limited itself to emphasising his inadequacy and weakness in relation to the various problems that the western part of the empire was experiencing; indeed, barbarian incursions, complex religious issues, and the constant need for considerable economic resources were formally entrusted to the purple of a teenager, given that Honorius came to power in 395 when he was only eleven years old. In fact, it was others who influenced the political direction of Honorius' reign, among them Stilicho and Constantius III: the former as regent appointed by Theodosius I on his deathbed, the latter also appointed emperor in 421. This does not detract from the fact that the figure and reign of Honorius nevertheless deserves to be framed in the light of both the few literary testimonies we have (e.g. Zosimus, Claudian and the chronological sources) and, above all, through the more than four hundred and fifty constitutions issued by his chancellery in the twenty-eight years of his reign. In particular, the biography of the young emperor will be traced, highlighting the most salient and most debated moments in the literature, with particular reference to his childhood and the role of Stilicho. It has been decided to provide a list of all constitutions attributed to Honorius that are known from the Theodosian Codex and the Codex Iustinianus, giving their respective correspondences, a summary of their content and data on their addressee and dating. Two Appendices, dedicated respectively to the addressees of the constitutions and the places of promulgation, data that can be deduced from the inscriptiones and subscriptiones, conclude this section, to offer hints for prosopographical research and to assess the movements of the imperial comitatus. Then, a number of thematic in-depth studies were carried out: the first encompasses some interventions by Honorius' chancellery on African issues, both from an anti-heretical and anti-pagan perspective, as well as disciplining public order (discipline against raids by nomadic peoples and the case of Heraclianus). Finally, we wanted to identify some of Honorius' constitutions on the subject of succession in order to verify how the institutions and classical law were transposed and possibly adapted to new situations. Many of the major questions concerning late antique legislation stand out when dealing with Honorius' legacy of legislation: from the relationship between the West and the East to the choices of legislative technique oscillating between a concrete case and a tension towards generalisation, from the effects of the textual manipulations carried out by Theodosius II's commissioners to the manuscript tradition of the two Codices.