The transition from a civic to a Christian model of society has been viewed by many scholars as one of the crucial transformations of Late Antiquity. Nevertheless, this view has the drawback of presenting civic categories as mere fossils destined to disappear and the discourse about poverty and charity as a force that gives a place to "the poor", but that is never shaped by them. The aim of this paper is to question the relevance of this approach in the particular case of the North African cities during the fourth and fifth centuries. I hope to demonstrate how this new discourse on charity and poverty could be adapted by city dwellers for their own ends. By the same token, we shall see how this discourse could indeed coexist in the urban popular milieu with the older notions of citizenship and rights as part of the same repertoire of survival strategies and forms of collective action.
poverty; citizenship; late Roman Africa