Religious Intolerance in the Later Roman Empire - Bad request ...

interestingly, the law (or more accurately regulations) made no mention of the
councils, membership of which had been a constant concern in earlier legislation on
the exemption from liturgies enjoyed by clerics. Rather the law tended to indicate that
the exemptions were a personal affair, granted to individuals, and a sense of
individuality pervades the law: “no person” or “if any man is protected by our law.”
The fact that the councils were not mentioned might have meant that any individual
belonging to one of the groups listed was still liable to perform liturgies through
(perhaps compulsory by wealth) membership of the council; that is, he had a collective
responsibility along with his fellow councillors, even if and by the letter of this law, he
was personally exempt.
Thirdly, Tatianus had not actually mentioned clerics as one of the groups
exempt; “by a similar grant of privilege We bestow such rights upon the churches.”
“The churches” did not enjoy an identical privilege, but “similar.” Although
admittedly, and in practice, clerics’ exemptions may have been the same as other
exemptees, the use of “similar” imposed an ambiguity on the clerics’ liability and thus
ensured that in the future some effort would have to be employed to remove such
ambiguities. Of the three groups of people listed as exempt, only this group was
identified in such vague terms, rather than what they actually did (as in “rhetoricians
and grammarians of both branches of learning”), or even to what institution they
belonged (as in “those at the summit of the imperial service and the counts of the
imperial consistory”). In view of the subtleties which Tatianus had employed in his
earlier legislation, it seems likely that he was again attempting to make life as difficult
as possible for the clerics; the use of “the churches” in this definitional manner, was in
practice, meaningless, and it would have been necessary (at least potentially) for any
cleric claiming exemption to have to prove that the exemption granted to the
somewhat anonymous “the churches” actually applied to him.
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