DEFENSOR CIVITATIS. — A civic magistrate for the defense of the humbler classes against the abuses and excessive power of the local magistrates.
It was created at the beginning of the fourth century, when the structure of the Empire was already showing signs of weakening. The office of the d. c. received its own regulations, at least for the Illyricum, in 368 from Valentinian I.
The d. c. had a predecessor in the patronus civitatis o coloniae, but was neither its continuation nor a simple replacement for II. The patronus served as an intermediary between the colony and the Senate or the central authorities; the d. c., on the other hand, was an institutum of social assistance, a state advocate for defending the rights of the poor and oppressed before the local authorities. The d. c. met with great favor. Soon, not only the cities but every community capable of holding rights had its own d.: associations, the gentes, the Senate, and the treasury. The office of the d. c. was at first held for life (d. perpetuus), then was reduced to five years, and under Justinian (527–65) to two.
The d. c. was to show his protégés paternal solicitude: imprimis parentis vicem plebi exhibem, says Justinian (Cod. Inst., I, 55, 8). The information provided by the papyri is interesting: in them we encounter one man who appeals to the d. c. to be released from imprisonment, where he is being held for debts, and another who asks to be released from torture (cf. P. De Francisci, Storia del diritto romano, III, 1, Milano 1943, p. 153).
To perform his functions more readily, the d. c. had free access to the praeses, the praefectus praetorio, the magister equitum, and even the emperor, to whom he could directly report abuses. Originally, the d. c. was appointed by the praefectus praetorio and chosen from among members of the ordo senatorius who had held important offices. But it was not easy to find a sufficient number of capable, worthy, and disinterested persons, and so in 387 Theodosius I resorted to a system of election. The d. c. was proposed by the city concerned through a decision of its own senate (Cod. Theod. 1, 29, 6). In 409 Honorius transferred the election to the bishop together with the three classes of the primores civitatis. The election was then approved by the praefectus praetorio, by the emperor under the provisions of Majorian, and, under the Ostrogoths, by the kings.
Despite all these rearrangements, limitations, and precautions, the d. c. achieved his purpose only in rare cases. The imperial officials realized that he was a weapon against them and gradually annulled his power, making him an instrument of their own interests and increasingly restricting the action of the d. c. to the judicial sphere in cases of lesser importance. Justinian made a final attempt to save the institution by increasing its power and prestige, but the situation does not appear to have improved. A sign of this may be seen in the fact that, for some time already, the poor and oppressed had no longer placed their trust in the d. c. and had turned to the protection of the Church. A canon of the Council of Carthage of 401 denounces «afflictionem pauperum quorum molestias sine intermissione fatigatur Ecclesia» (Conc. Carth. V, can. 9; Mansi, Conc. ampl. coll., III, 778), and for this reason the same Council decreed that the emperors should be asked to appoint a d. pauperum for the protection of the rights of the poor, thus with powers similar to those of the d. c. This demonstrates that the d. c., already at the beginning of the fifth century, had lost much of its importance, and also reveals the Church’s tendency to place the action of the d. c., exercised by laymen, alongside the pastoral action of the bishops. The organs created within the ecclesiastical sphere gradually came to replace the imperial ones, as the latter progressively disappeared.