Municipal Honours

In this work, we study the hispano-roman municipal oligarchies, the processes of formation of the civic elites, their internal composition, the instruments used to control the public life of their communities (performance of magistracies and priesthoods, evergetism, municipal honours), their wealth sources, as well as the main manifestations which show that the hispanic elites adopted completely the social values and behaviours typical of the roman society: its munificent activities, its autorepresentational forms (statues, honorific monuments, etc.), its connection with the official roman religion and with the imperial cult. Finally, we analyzed the causes that led to local elites to lose much of their interest in participating in public municipal life.

"His ordo decrevit: funeral honours in the cities of the Bética".
From the information provided by the epigraphic sources, we present the different types of funeral honours decreed by the Senates of the cities of the Bética. The analysis of the inscriptions leads us to raising possible solutions that allow to explain the absence of the term funus publicum in the Hispanic epigraphy, or the presence of laudatio between the honours granted by the municipalities and colonies of Hispania and Mauritania. Also, we approach other subjects of interest, like the place of location of the decreed statues; the burial spaces used by those who received locus sepulturae; the social groups to which the honoured ones belonged; and the financing of these honours.

In this work we have collected the information of tituli engraved of the Baetica, and have crossed it with the data on  the place of finding of some of these statuary supports (forums, theaters, graves, domus), with the purpose of establishing some norms that allows us to determine the type of space (public, domestic or funerary) where other many bases of statues, found outside their original location, could be originally located, and if, they were erected as public, decreed or authorized by ordines decurionum, or simply made by relatives, clients or friends as private homages.