Law, Empire, and Identity between West and East

Compared to the rich material from Egypt, evidence for law and legal practice in the Danubian provinces is rather slim. Still, inscriptions offer some insights into how Roman law was received, applied, and transformed in the second and early third centuries CE. Moving from West to East, the article will discuss three case studies and their wider implications. The rescript of Septimius Severus regarding membership in a collegium centonariorum at Solva in Noricum not only shows the emperor directly involved in a legal dispute, but also testifies to the application of the rules on collegia vel corpora known from the Digest. The wax tablets from Alburnus Maior in Dacia show how private legal practice could be shaped by Roman models, but diverge from them as people saw fit, leading to legal forms that have been frowned upon as ‘invalid’ by scholars of Roman law, but must have been useful to people at that time and place. Finally, the new municipal law from Troesmis in Moesia Inferior can be understood as a symbolic assertion of Roman identity in a region bordering on the barbaricum. From a range of rather different epigraphical sources, the multiple uses of Roman law can be deduced, leading to an overall impression that is not entirely different from what is found in the East.

The leges municipales as a Means of Legal and Social Romanization of the Provinces of the Roman Empire

Sections of the leges municipales from at least forty different cities in Southern Spain have survived to us. These laws, understood as a powerful instrument by which Roman legal regulations were introduced into the provinces, are usually connected with Baetica. As a result it is too easy to overlook the fact that corresponding leges were issued wherever Roman or Latin cities were founded, and continued to be issued long after the Flavian era, the time to which most of the surviving fragments date. Documentary evidence has now made clear that leges municipales are a general phenomenon which continued to play a role in the second and third centuries CE. Fragments of city laws are known not only in the province of Alpes Maritimae, but also in Noricum (Lauriacum), Moesia superior (Ratiaria), and in Troesmis (Moesia inferior). The law for Troesmis is especially important because, in contrast to the laws from Baetica, it was issued for a Roman and not a Latin municipium. This demonstrates that specific Roman legal regulations, which were issued in Augustan times exclusively for Roman citizens, were still of relevance in the second century and also must have been used in the province of Moesia inferior. This material indicates that people had to obey Roman legal regulations more or less everywhere in nearly all provinces of the West. The leges municipales were thus one of the decisive means by which Roman law spread in the provinces—more so than has previously been realized—and could even be the basis for daily life.

Local Understandings of Roman Criminal Law and Procedure in Asia Minor

This chapter deals with the knowledge provincials had, and the use they made, of Roman criminal procedure in the provinces of Asia Minor during the imperial period. This will be examined through two main categories of evidence: (1) petitions to emperors complaining about Roman soldiers or functionaries’ abuses against local population, (2) funerary inscriptions including provisions claiming that fines should be paid to the imperial treasury in case of desecration. This evidence supports the view that (unlike part of scholarship has been assuming for a long time) Roman criminal procedure still included accusatorial features under the Principate and that a formal accusation was needed for a proper criminal investigation to be launched. It is argued that provincials were deeply aware of what Roman criminal law was and could explicitly refer to some specific provisions in order to defend their own interests and even to challenge decisions made by the Roman administration.

The Decision of Septimius Severus and Caracalla on longi temporis praescriptio (BGU 267 and P.Strass. 22)

In the provinces, the emperor is the representative of the centralized empire and in his decisions and regulations he therefore mainly used Roman law. The institute of long-lasting possession has a scholarly history of being traced back to either Roman or provincial law, and thus the debates encapsulate many of the recurring tensions between provincial practice and centralizing tendencies. Through a detailed study of two documents pertaining to the longi temporis praescriptio that record the decision of Septimius Severus and Caracalla (BGU 267 and P. Strass. 22), this article locates the origins of the institute firmly in a provincial context and explains how the emperor was confronted with the requirements of provincial legal practice.

Legal Education and Legal Culture in Gaul during the Principate

From a conceptual point of view, it has often been pointed out that education is a key way in which cultural models, expectations, and standards are disseminated. The pervasiveness and success of the Greek model known as enkyklios paideia have been amply charted for the Hellenistic and Imperial Periods. Similar developments have been traced in the context of Roman education and Latin literacy in the provinces, not least the West. However, these studies have focused primarily on—to use a contested term—acculturation in certain aspects of daily life as well as in terms of education in the Latin language and in Roman literature, while law has been largely left out. Part of the reason for this is no doubt the lack of much very direct evidence. Yet the evidence there is, in particular the paraphrase of Gaius’ Institutes known as the Fragmenta Augustodunensia (FA), has in fact been unduly marginalized. Accordingly, this chapter shows that, focusing on Autun and its cultural sphere, it is possible to piece together a picture of how students in Imperial Gaul were trained in the basics of Roman law.

Public Law in Roman North Africa

Roman Africa is distinguished by the quantity and diversity of surviving evidence for the operation of public law. Although there is a lack of evidence for rules of jurisdiction such as survive for Sicily, the Iberian provinces, or especially Cisalpine Gaul, epigraphic material from Africa does allow for reconstruction of public law institutions that bear on the themes of this volume in at least two fields. First, the lex agraria provides information about the nature and degree of interest on the part of Roman authorities in Rome to regulate control of agricultural land. Second, a recently recovered inscription from Carthage, which has been interpreted as the lex sacra, probably of the cult of the Cereres (but which is probably a feriale for the sacra publica of the colony), provides detailed evidence for both the importation from Italy of Roman institutions and the preservation within the colony of the worship of indigenous gods. Each text provides information about the time of its production; they do not allow a clear-cut view for an increase in the importance of Roman norms. However, the epigraphic evidence for the spread of Roman public institutions, especially magistracies and the language of res publicae, can be situated alongside these statutes to yield a complex picture of law in the province over several hundred years.

Roman City-Laws of Spain and their Modelling of the Religious Landscape

The Roman municipal laws from Spain tell us much more about the political constitution of Roman cities than any other document from the Western provinces. However, the fragments at our disposal do not provide information about the social and religious identity of the citizens and incolae. A short survey of Latin inscriptions in Spain shows that in Baetica, where the municipal laws were found, there is very little evidence for indigenous cults, in contrast to other Spanish provinces, numerous deities and cults are attested. It is suggested that municipal laws do not add much to our knowledge of religious life in the cities precisely because they were conceptualized as blueprints for different cities with different conditions. The lack of precise instructions regarding religious institutions is to be seen as part of a broader concept. Thus, in a paragraph of the late-republican constitution for the colony of Urso, the city council has the right to complete the calendar, i.e. to define the official cults. In the Flavian constitution of Irni, such a paragraph is missing, but instead another indication of local authority in respect to possible acculturation can be found: the founder is allowed to legislate, but only within the limits of Roman customary law. Roman cities in Spain were able to autonomously model the religious landscape in response to local needs, a capacity clearly expressed in legal terms.

The Integration and Perception of the Rule of Law in Roman Crete

The contrast between Rome’s difficult and bloody conquest of Crete on the one hand and the absence of any conflicts after the island’s integration into the Roman imperium on the other has not escaped the notice of modern scholars. It has often led to the suspicion that the conquerors had, from the start, disempowered the institutional idiosyncrasies of the conquered. However, careful scrutiny of the literary and epigraphic sources allows for the development of a more complex picture. That picture depends partly on the density of political, military, and institutional events that befell Crete in the last third of the first century BCE, and partly on the interaction between Roman legal culture and a Dorian mentality profoundly rooted in the island’s population. From the artificial creation of a provincia Creta-Cyrenaica (following a twofold military campaign and a conflict between Q. Metellus and Cn. Pompeius) to the experience of the confederative Creta libera, led by a Kretarchas, under the triumvirate; from the conservation of the ‘Gortyn code’ at the turn of the first century CE to the syssitia of Lyttos at the end of the second; from the introduction of the Campanian factor on the territory of Cnossos by Octavian to the persistent memory of a semi-proprietary system for the agricultural exploitation of the Messara plain: the composition of the Cretan legal landscape in the time of the Late Republic and the Principate is reminiscent of a Mediterranean fresco. This composition will be outlined in this chapter in order to give a more nuanced picture of Crete’s legal culture.

Navigating Roman Law and Local Privileges in Pontus-Bithynia

The chapter starts from the questions raised by a well-known (but underexplored from this angle) source for Roman governmental practice in provinces, the correspondence of Pliny the Younger as governor of Pontus-Bithynia in c.109–11 CE with the emperor Trajan. It attempts to integrate this correspondence with evidence from the legal and documentary sources on peculiarities of Bithynian law in the High Imperial period. Behind the deceptively straightforward presentation of legal issues in Pliny’s letters to the emperor there can be discovered a much more complex interaction between the interests of individuals, communities, their legal representatives and the governor himself. Particular attention is paid to the continuing role of the lex Pompeia, an uncharacteristically extensive set of Roman regulations for the province, going back to its early years. May a case in fact be made for the decrease in Roman legal interference in the early imperial period?

Law and Romanization in Judaea

Judaea in many ways posed a problem to Roman administrators, and not just due to the history of rebellion in the region in the first and second centuries CE. How should a population with its own very distinctive legal tradition be administered in the context of the imperial enterprise? This chapter concentrates particularly on the question of the availability and interaction of different jurisdictions in the region from 6 CE, when the area first came under direct Roman rule, up to the foundation of Aelia Capitolina. It is argued that the odd administration of the region makes this a particularly problematic case, and the oscillation between indirect and direct rule was a key factor in assessing the level of Roman influence on legal forms and institutions.