XIIIth of the network Impact of Empire 

The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire

Ghent, 21-24 June 2017

Organizing committee: Koenraad Verboven, Olivier Hekster & Wouter Vanacker

Description of the project
Programme
Abstracts

“There is a people on earth that fights for the freedom of others … so that there would be no unjust rule in the world and everywhere justice, and divine and human law would be strongest.” (Livy, 33,33)

Description

‘Justice’ was the moral value that most legitimised Rome’s right to rule. It was the core political virtue that justified the power entrusted to a living emperor. Elites, city-dwellers, land-holders and peasants, from widely different cultural backgrounds, were addressed as—and millions believed themselves to be—stakeholders of a social order that was fundamentally governed by law and justice.

And yet, the violence and brutality with which Rome conquered and subdued its empire was on a scale rarely witnessed before. Its rule relied on structural violence towards slaves and indigenous people. The ‘rule of law’ that Rome imposed, cannot have been perceived as just by all inhabitants of the empire. Nonetheless, millions of them did expect justice from Roman authorities, or local authorities backed up by Rome, and arranged their lives accordingly. For centuries, the magic worked.

The conference brings together an international team of scholars to discuss the topic of justice in the Roman Empire. How did law and justice affect the creation and working of the empire’s social, economic and administrative system? Our emphasis will be on the workings of legal systems within imperial societies, rather than on jurisprudence as such.

More specifically, the papers will consider justice in the Romen Empire from the following perspectives:

• how the concept of justice resonated through the empire’s political culture(s) from the emperor down to local authorities (or how it was challenged by counter-cultures)
• how dominant ideologies co-opted notions of justice as a means of legitimating the social power of civic and imperial elites, and of the emperor
• how the concept of justice was perceived through and influenced by cultural manifestations
• how and how far administration enforced the law
• how legal institutions—those endowed with the authority to create and those with the authority to interpret and enforce rules—functioned and changed
• how Roman law and other legal traditions (Greek, Punic, Jewish, Christian…) regulated and affected social and economic life

Programme

Ghent University, Culture and Convention Center "Het Pand".
Rector Blancquaert zaal

Wednesday June 21st

15h00 Welcome Coffee

• 15h30 Welcome and Introduction (K. Verboven and O. Hekster)

Session chair: O.  Hekster

• 15h35 Substantive justice in provincial and Roman legal argument (Key note lecture: Clifford Ando, Clifford Ando, University of Chicago / University of South Africa)
• 16h15 The spectacle of justice in the Roman Empire (Margherita Carucci)
• 16h40 Discussion

17h15 Reception

Thursday June 22nd

Morning session chair: L. De Blois

• 9h00 Culture politique impériale et pratique de la justice. Regards croisés sur la figure du prince "injuste" (Key note lecture Stéphane Bénoist (Université de Lille [SHS], UMR HALMA 8164)  & Anne Gangloff, (Université de Rennes 2, LAHM - UMR CReAAH 6566))
• 9h40 Imperator decrevit. Law and justice in the judicial decisions of Septimius Severus. (Elsemieke Daalder, Leiden University)
• 10h05 Discussion

10h35 Coffee Break

• 11h05 The value of the stability of the law. A perspective on the role of the emperor in political crises (Francesco Bono, University of Pavia)
• 11h30 Legal education and the propagation of the emperor's justice (Matthijs Wibier, University of Pavia)
• 11h55 Discussion

12h30 Lunch

Afternoon session chair: Anna Kolb

• 13h30 The murder of Aëtius by Valentinian III (454 CE) - Socio-institutional considerations on penal justice (Jeroen Wijnendaele, Ghent University)
• 13h55 The Hadrianic chancery: imperial law and Greek cities (Juan Manuel Cortés Copete, Universidad Pablo de Olavide)

14h20 Discussion

15h00 Board Meeting

19:00 Diner

Friday June 23rd

Morning session chair: Bernard Palme

• 9h00 La justice, la res publica et l'Empire. Le principe de subsidiarité à l'échelle de l'Empire romain (Key note lecture Frédéric Hurlet, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)
• 9h40 How did citizenship work? Latins and Roman citizens in a common Empire (Pedro Lopez Barja de Quiroga, University of Santiago de Compostela)
• 10h05 Discussion

10h35 Coffee Break

• 11h05 Poster sessions:
• New forms of legal institutions in the contracts from the 'archive of Protarchos' (Anna Arpaia, University of Florence)
• Gracchus brothers, different support for dissimilar political goals (Adur Intxaurrandieta Ormazabal, University of Santiago de Compostela)
• The impact of the emperor: imperial presence and absence in the courtroom (Ralph Lange, University of Cologne)
• Ideology and historical narrative : the member of provincial elites claiming for justice in the Ab vrbe condita (Marine Miquel, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)

12h05 Lunch

Aftenoon session chair: Marietta Horster

• 13h15 Inscia legum, ignara magistratuum. The competing laws of Jews and Egyptians in the wake of the Diaspora Revolt. The versions of Apion, Josephus, and Tacitus (Livia Capponi, University of Pavia)
• 13h40 A pallio ad togam: provincial elites as lawyers and judges in Roman imperial courts (Anna Dolganov, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
• 14h05 Discussion

14h35 Coffee Break

• 15h05 War, peace, justice and Rome's legal discourse of empire building at the end of the Republic. (Toni Ñaco del Hoyo, Universitat de Girona)
• 15h30 Discussion

Saturday June 24th

Session chair: K. Verboven

• 9h00 Appropriating 'Justice': Christian intellectuals and the Lex of XII Tables in late antique western Empire (Alessandro Maranesi, Radboud University Nijmegen)
• 9h30 'Between theory and reality'. Roman security legislation and their realisation (Peter Herz, University of Regensburg)
• 9h55 Discussion

10h25 Coffee Break

• 10h45 The impact of Roman justice on women: control, regulation and gender marginalization in imperial rescripts (Pilar Pavón Torrejón, Universidad de Sevilla)
• 11h10 Gender roles in Roman law of succession, their tradition and perception (Elena Köstner, University of Regensburg / Heilbronn University)
• 11h35 Discussion
• 12h05 Closing talk

Abstracts

Wednesday 21 June

Substantive justice in provincial and Roman legal argument
(Key note lecture: Clifford Ando, Clifford Ando, University of Chicago / University of South Africa)

There is more than one discourse of law in the Roman world, and justice plays several complicated roles in all of them. To the Roman world at large, the Romans promised to restore and sustain the rule of law. At a technical level, this generally meant supporting the on-going validity of local systems of law. (More specifically, the Romans identified political units as sovereign within territories and allowed their law-making and law-applying institutions to operate throughout.) But because the courts of Roman magistrates often functioned as courts of the second instance, Roman magistrates occasionally had to choose between local law and their own notions of justice or, one might saw, between fulfilling, in any given decision, substantive or procedural justice. In the discourse of law at Rome, there also operated a tension between some understanding of the law system as inherently just and contingent concerns that excessive attention to rules or words might lead to a substantively unjust outcome. In recent work, I have tried to bring into alignment the histories of analogical argumentation in provincial and jurisprudential reasoning. I believe that telling these two stories of arguments of procedural and substantive justice, in Rome and the provinces, might yield similar fruits.

The spectacle of justice in the Roman Empire
(Margherita Carucci)

In the articulations of justice in Roman imperial society, games and shows played a dual role. On one hand, they denoted the personal attitude to justice of the emperor, as the provider of the most splendid games who could decide whether a defeated gladiator should live or die; on the other hand, they offered to the large, anonymous crowd attending the public spectacles the opportunity to demand justice. With the support of textual evidence, this paper will discuss how rulers and ruled in the Roman Empire reinforced or challenged notions of justice in amphitheatres and circus as additional places within which the law was practiced.

Thursday 22 June

Culture politique impériale et pratique de la justice. Regards croisés sur la figure du prince "injuste"
(Key note lecture Stéphane Bénoist (Université de Lille [SHS], UMR HALMA 8164) & Anne Gangloff, (Université de Rennes 2, LAHM - UMR CReAAH 6566))

Le discours impérial est fondé, depuis Auguste jusqu'aux modèles tardifs des empereurs codificateurs, sur une lecture positive d'un bon prince dont les vertus, d'essence stoïcienne, comprennent notamment la iustitia et la clementia qui s'avèrent essentielles dans l'approche raisonnée du gouvernement de l'empereur, magister legum, sous le regard des dieux puis de Dieu.
Cette communication entend croiser la documentation épigraphique et numismatique avec les données rhétoriques des miroirs du bon prince afin de traiter les situations « exceptionnelles » mettant en relief les contre-exemples d'une pratique injuste du pouvoir. Il s'agit de proposer une illustration concrète et renouvelée de ces figures mettant à mal la culture politique des trois premiers siècles de l'empire.

Imperator decrevit. Law and justice in the judicial decisions of Septimius Severus.
(Elsemieke Daalder, Leiden University)

The emperor was the pinnacle of the Roman legal system. He was perceived as the ultimate source of law and justice and therefore all of his legal acts (edicts, rescripts and even judicial decisions) had force of law (D. 1,4,1 pr.). At the same time, cultural values dictated that, even though the emperor was not bound by the laws, it befitted him to live in accordance with them (see for example D. 32,23). The delicate balance between these two concepts features prominently in the judicial decisions of the emperor. This paper researches how Septimius Severus dealt with the rule of law and the distribution of justice in his judicial decisions and how these decisions contributed to the representation of imperial power.

The value of the stability of the law. A perspective on the role of the emperor in political crises
(Francesco Bono, University of Pavia)

According to prevailing ideology, the emperor guarantees the peace and the order to all the Empire; but what happens when the imperial power is usurped? Such a political crisis in fact produces social and administrative changes that are a deep rift in the judicial system. Often referred back to as "tyranny", the consequences of the usurpation must be cancelled and only a legitimate emperor can ensure the stability of the law system and regulate the relations between the subjects. The way by which the emperors re-establish the order of the law can be examined from a double point of view. From one side, in public law emperors profess to be restoring the status quo ante; in particular, they decree the damnatio memoriae and order that enactments done under the usurper shall be nullified. From the other side, they confirm all the private legal acts during the time of tyranny, because the danger of collapse in the social and economic relationships must be avoided: an example of this is given by CTh. 15.14.9, the constitution by which Arcadius and Honorius save the effects for the contracts concluded under Flavius Eugenius.
The paper focuses on the political crises of the later Roman empire, from Constantine to the Theodosian age, and aims to describe the role of the emperors as fons iustitiae in order to understand the connection between legislation and imperial ideology.

Legal education and the propagation of the emperor's justice
(Matthijs Wibier, University of Pavia)

This paper explores how the role of the emperor in the Roman system of justice was promoted through legal education, with special attention for the so-called Fragmenta Augustodunensia.
From a conceptual point of view, it has often been pointed out that education is an important way in which cultural models, expectations, and standards are disseminated. The pervasiveness and success of the Greek model known as egkyklios paideia have been amply charted for the Hellenistic and Imperial Periods. Scholars have similarly explored issues of Roman education and Latin literacy, especially in the provinces of the Empire. It should be emphasised that the scholarship has focused primarily on "acculturation" in certain aspects of daily life and with regard to the Latin language and Roman literature, while the spread of knowledge about Roman law has been much less studied in detail. As I will argue in more detail in my paper, however, knowledge of Roman law must have been an important aspect of "Romanisation" – of acquiring the cultural knowledge to engage with those in high positions and in control of resources. Furthermore, it is important to recognise that there is more than one aspect to Roman law as a carrier of cultural information. Most obviously, acquiring knowledge of the law and of legal procedure empowers the individual in various ways, for example to take action in court, to advise friends, or to seek employment in the Empire's bureaucracy. At the same time, I argue, the way in which Roman law is expounded in legal textbooks and in legal education also projects a certain view of Roman society, of power structures, and of Roman self-perceptions, much like literary education provides an introduction to narratives about the world from the perspective of the Romans.
In this paper, I will explore in more detail how texts used in legal education construct a particular view of the sources of law and justice. The partial survival of the Fragmenta Augustundensia, Late Antique lecture notes based on Gaius Institutes, is particularly helpful here, since they allows us to see how a later educational text discusses and rewrites Gaius' work of the early Empire. A marked difference between the two works is that, while Gaius highlights the importance of such legal authorities as the senate and the magistrates, the parallel passages in the FA focus heavily on the centrality of the emperor as the source of law and justice, eliding and thereby eclipsing the role of the other bodies. I suggest that this development can be understood in the light of the changing discourse about the centrality of the emperor in the political and legal world, for example as we find in the Panegyrics among many other sources. In addition to making this fairly obvious point, I would also like to explore the mechanism whereby the increasingly emperor-centric view is "enforced". Rather than assuming some sort of state-mandated legal curriculum or law textbook, I will argue for the importance of cultural knowledge, i.e. of having a sense of the right way to speak to the powerful. Once more, the Panegyrics can help us see how such a strategy might be deployed in practice.

The murder of Aëtius by Valentinian III (454 CE) - Socio-institutional considerations on penal justice
(Jeroen Wijnendaele, Ghent University)

In 454, the western Roman emperor Valentinian III decided to personally murder his magister utriusque militiae Aëtius in the palace at Rome. This event raises important issues regarding the political culture of justice in the Late Roman world. The very fact that an emperor, the empire's supreme legal authority, had to kill a senior official without a trial and with his own hands seems to suggest an alarmingly diminishing capacity of the imperial office to uphold and enforce the law. The perceived righteousness or wickedness of Valentinian's action was also vigorously discussed in the writings of both contemporaries and later generations (whether in chronicles, letters, panegyrics or classicizing historiography). This paper wishes to examine the circumstances that may have led to Valentinian's decision, the legality of this matter, and its ramifications on the conception of justice in Roman literary culture.
More importantly, this paper wants to set this case-study in a larger framework relating to the administration of penal justice in the Late Roman world. Peter Spierenburg's seminal The Spectal of Suffering on Early Modern executions can form a point of departure to interpret shifts and evolution in this practice in the Roman world. A further analysis concerning state sanctioned eliminations of key officials in the Empire will serve to highlight the peculiarity of Valentinian's decision.

The Hadrianic chancery: imperial law and Greek cities
(Juan Manuel Cortés Copete, Universidad Pablo de Olavide)

The main hypothesis of this paper is that Hadrian created a new way to rule the Roman Empire: "governing the whole inhabited world by dispatching letters", in the words of Aelius Aristides. The formation of a proto-bureaucratic structure might seem in contradiction with his tireless traveling activity. However, as I will try to show, the presence of the emperor in the provinces became the first and major stimulus for the establishment of a more fluid relationship, which led to a constant epistolary exchange between the subjects and the emperor. The significant increase in the number of imperial letters in Hadrian's times suggests that a change had taken place in the way the Empire was ruled. Imperial epistles proved to be the right instruments not only to support the law, but also to adapt it to the different civic traditions, especially in the Greek East.
The way in which law was created had been changing from Augustus onwards. In fact, few statutes are explicitly designates as leges. Under the Empire, leges were mainly laws whose application was restricted to municipalities or imperial estates. New forms of legislation ("constitutions"), replaced the ancient Republicans laws. In Gaius's words, "an imperial constitution is whatever the emperor lays down by decretum, edictum or epistula". The huge number of Greek letters written by Hadrian and preserved in inscriptions, about ninety in all, allows to analyse the ways in which law was created, enforced, communicated and sustained in philosophical and legal principles.
The first point that may be drawn from the analysis of Hadrian's epistolary corpus is that the most frequent form of relation between cities and Emperor was the "petition and response" model. The cities requested the emperor to grant or renew a privilege or benefit, such as freedom, immunity from taxes, a new building program or financial assistance. Hadrian usually conceded what the city requested, accepting the arguments put forward by the city in the decree and the official embassy. Nevertheless, in some cases, the Emperor offered new reasons for his own decision, reasons based on his idea of what was just, to dikaion, and what was necessary, to anankaion.
On the other hand, imperial letters could be used to resolve political disputes within cities, between cities or within regional leagues. In such cases the epistle became a kind of judicial resolution, supported by the legal force emanating from the highest magistracy in the Empire.
Finally, there is another novelty in the corpus of Hadrianic epistles that should be stressed. One of the most significant differences between rescripts and letters is the existence, or not, of a procedure to publish the imperial constitution. For the rescripts, propositio was the regular way to notify the petitioner and the reason why the rescript could gain general legal value. Today we can set 129 as the terminus ante quem for the beginning of this procedure. However, the imperial letters were usually published by the cities, without any mandatory imperial order. Nevertheless, in some cases, Hadrian ordered that the publication of the epistle was made by cities or leagues. For this reason, I believe that these letters gained legal strength.
To conclude, under Hadrian we find expressly stated the constitutional theory that what the emperor has decided has the force of law and possesses a general effect. Imperial letters were an instrument to exercise his decision-making powers: ius venit ex epistula divi Hadriani (Vat. Frag. 151).

Friday 23 June

La justice, la res publica et l'Empire. Le principe de subsidiarité à l'échelle de l'Empire romain 
(Key note lecture Frédéric Hurlet, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)

t.b.a.

How did citizenship work? Latins and Roman citizens in a common Empire
(Pedro Lopez Barja de Quiroga, University of Santiago de Compostela)

"Nihil est enim liberale, quod non idem iustum--- Cic. Off. 1,43.
There were multiple citizenships in the Roman Empire and not all of them were on an equal footing. Therefore it is not easy to disentangle the connections between them and the consequences for anyone of changing his citizenships. In this paper, we will focus on two specific issues of this dossier: 1. how Roman law dealt with the consequences of someone becoming a Roman citizen, how this changed his relations with other kin according to the law. Pliny's considerations on the ius Latii in his Panegyric are an outstanding testimony to the complex issues that were at stake: citizenship, aequitas, beneficium, uectigalia. His discussion of the subjects hinges on the question of justice; he wants to prove that this imperial beneficium does not violate aequitas even if it means that less money is collected into the imperial treasure. Should new citizens receive the same privileges as the old ones? 2. What was the relation between municipal and Junian Latinity? Our main objective is not to make a detailed analysis of all the legal aspects and niceties involved but to get a clearer picture of how citizenship worked and how the Roman emperors used it while ruling an Empire."

New forms of legal institutions in the contracts from the 'archive of Protarchos'
(Anna Arpaia, University of Florence)

My aim is to discuss 'innovative' legal institutions - apparently in conflict with the principles of Greek law -, contained in the contracts from the so-called 'Archive of Protarchos'; these documents were drawn up in a court of Alexandria in the first decades of Roman rule (30-9 BC). The continuity and innovation elements can be explained from time to time with the legal entities involved (for example, the category of 'Persians of the descent'), with the particular nature of the object or with a functional rehabilitation of pre-existing legal institutions. The focus will arise on the promise of payment contained in the BGU IV 1146, linked to the indefinite nature of products - perhaps destined to delayed delivery, then on recording a double pass for the deed of sale of an extended landed property (BGU IV 1129). Finally, a separate discussion has to be reserved to the outcome of the legal institution of 'anticresis' in the Roman period, which dates back to the Egyptian practice or also to the Greek-Macedonian one: from the credit-guarantee comparable to the renting of 'catecic' land to usufruct of 'anticretical'-houses (of which I intend to discuss the possible first Roman attestation in BGU IV 1158).

Gracchus brothers, different support for dissimilar political goals
(Adur Intxaurrandieta Ormazabal, University of Santiago de Compostela)

Ancient sources disagree on their treatment of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus. While some classical authors see a common political pattern unifying both trajectories, others point out the non-negligible differences between them (for instance App. BC I, 11-22; D.S. XXXIV / XXXV, 25, 1). Modern historiography generally follows the first of these two approaches. However, I think Appian and Diodorus were right. Tiberius wants to achieve certain equality among all citizens, in conjunction with the ideal of stoic justice that he borrowed from his mentor and collaborator, Blossius of Cumae. This stoic project will materialize in his famous reform (Erskine 1990; Linttot 1994). On the other hand, the legislation brought about by Caius caused a serious confrontation between senatores and equites. Even the support they received was different, since Tiberius counted on the support of other members of the aristocracy (Plut. TG 9), while Caius had the populace on his side (Plut. CG 12). In this paper I will try to show how they searched for different ways of legitimizing their political agenda: the Stoic idea of justice, in the case of Tiberius, and a more radical, democratic ideology in the case of Caius.

The impact of the emperor: imperial presence and absence in the courtroom
(Ralph Lange, University of Cologne)

The 2000 issue of the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry contained a psychological argument entitled The Emperor in the Courtroom. The elegantly snatched caption is, of course, reminiscent of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the dictum seems fitting to unravel an inquiry on the emperor's actual business in the courtroom. The paper would therefore like to explore the roles of, and expectations towards, the emperor at court, focussing on the impact of the emperor's presence and absence in jurisdiction. According to Suetonius, Augustus often participated in court sessions, testified and was occasionally even proven wrong (Suet. Aug. 56). His successor Tiberius on the other hand is rendered a virtually impenetrable figure in Tacitus' vivid account of L. Piso's trial (Tac. ann. 3.15.). This depiction refers to the question of how ambivalent the emperor's presence or absence respectively were and how they influenced the players, the audience, and even a pending decision in trials. It raises the point of how senators could handle the situation, too. What difference did the emperor make? The proposed paper and its arguments are drawn from the pool of my dissertation project dealing with the historical dynamics of presence and distance in Roman political culture.

Ideology and historical narrative : the member of provincial elites claiming for justice in the Ab vrbe condita
(Marine Miquel, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)

A lot of studies underlined the main part played by the ideologic concept of bellum iustum and by the promotion of libertas in the Roman conquest. After the conquest, it seems that the rhetoric of bellum iustum became the « rhetoric of Justice » and supported the Roman rule for centuries. This ideologic concept of the fair rule of Rome on the conquered peoples of Roman Empire was developped by iconography, architectural complexes, religious and cultural ceremonies, but also, as we will demonstrate in this paper, by historical narratives, such as Livy's monumental work. Indeed, several papers underlined that the Ab urbe condita's audience was not limited to the Roman elite but included the people all around the Roman empire, as the episode of the travel of the inhabitant of Gabes to Rome in a letter of Pliny shows it. In this regard, we intend to underline how the Ab vrbe condita built up and offered to its audience the type of the member of provincial elites who are able to claim for the justice of Rome and defend their cities against the abuses of its administration. We will study the elaboration of this type, and will wonder if this type is stereotyped or if it evolves when the narration deals with various geographical areas and historical eras. We intend to demonstrate that this elaboration did not weaken but on the contrary was aimed to strengthen the rule of Rome. Finally, we will discuss how far such historical narratives could have impacted the common perception throught the various provincial areas.

Inscia legum, ignara magistratuum. The competing laws of Jews and Egyptians in the wake of the Diaspora Revolt. The versions of Apion, Josephus, and Tacitus
(Livia Capponi, University of Pavia)

This paper aims to examine the different points of view of an Egyptian polymath (Apion of Oasis), a Jewish historian (Flavius Josephus) and a Roman historian (Cornelius Tacitus) in presenting the legal systems of Jews and Egyptians as compatible or incompatible with the Roman Empire. The apologetic attitude that characterizes the works of both Apion and Josephus will be analyzed as instrumental to the "integration" of Egyptian and Jewish culture respectively in the reigns of different emperors, from Tiberius to Nerva. The relevance of this competition at the time of the Diaspora Revolt will be devoted further attention. Finally, this paper will assess the outcome of this cultural / legal competition as emerging from some crucial yet understudied passages of Tacitus.

A pallio ad togam: provincial elites as lawyers and judges in Roman imperial courts
(Anna Dolganov, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

This paper outlines a key aspect of the development and impact of the Roman imperial administration of justice, which was the rise of forensic activity as a prestige practice of provincial elites. In line with the aristocratic traditions of the city of Rome, provincial sources from the second and third centuries shows members of the provincial aristocracy appearing as advocates, legal experts, judges and judicial advisors in Roman imperial courts. This was an empire-wide development, attested in both Greek and Latin inscriptions and widely thematized in imperial literature. Furthermore, even before elite provincials begin to identify themselves as advocati and iurisperiti in public inscriptions, we can observe them in action in Egyptian papyri, where elite Alexandrians acting as advocates and legal experts at the court of the Roman governor display a remarkable knowledge of Roman law and wield authority over questions of local law. As illustrated by the Late Roman evidence, at which point forensic activity had become a sine qua non of civil careers at all levels of the imperial administration, the engagement of provincial elites in forensic activity was instrumental to the institutional and cultural fabric of empire, and to the development of imperial law.

War, peace, justice and Rome's legal discourse of empire building at the end of the Republic.
(Toni Ñaco del Hoyo, Universitat de Girona)

In a letter to his brother Quintus who was governor of Asia in 60 BC, Cicero suggested that the Asians ought to be firmly dealt with as true subjects ‒particularly regarding their legal status and tax obligations‒ if a permanent state of peace (sempiterna pax) was to be secured (Cic. Ep. Q. Fr. 1.1). This letter anticipated Rome's imperial legitimacy of an enduring peace, by means of what was eventually 'just' for Rome and its subjects. This said, it is also true that Cicero's wording echoed former stages of Roman expansion and the primary role of war for Roman society in order to achieve such supremacy, or hegemony, in Greek terms. In this paper, I intend to argue that theories on bellum iustum (also developed in Cicero's time and among others by Cicero himself) did not only serve the purpose to explain Rome's victories at war in its glorious past. In fact, Rome's eventual 'imperial' self-conscience at the very end of the Republican régime involved a similar discourse of political legitimacy based on Rome's actual right to rule. Therefore, war, justice, peace and hegemony were never so inextricably bound together as they were in this period.

Saturday 24 June

Appropriating 'Justice': Christian intellectuals and the Lex of XII Tables in late antique western Empire
(Alessandro Maranesi, Radboud University Nijmegen)

The so called Law of XII Tables is traditionally considered the legislation that stood at the foundation of the Roman idea of justice. In late fourth century CE it was re-employed, after a long period of scholastic dismissal (cf. Cicero, Leg.2.9), as educative model in Gallic schools. In the western part of the Empire we observe not only an increased use of it in technical non-juridical texts (i.e. the commentarii written by Macrobius and Servius) but in particular in encomiastic and polemic (anti-pagan) poetry. In fact, as shown by several passages of poetries composed by Ausonius, Prudentius, Sidonius and even in some inscriptions (cf. ILS.8987), the most antique Roman legal symbol became part of a social and ideological rediscovery and revival operated by Western Christian officials/intellectuals.
My paper intends to clarify how - ideologically appropriating the Law of XII Tables – these political agents reshaped a traditional concept of civil regulation and justice.

'Between theory and reality'. Roman security legislation and their realisation
(Peter Herz, University of Regensburg)

t.b.a.

The impact of Roman justice on women: control, regulation and gender marginalization in imperial rescripts
(Pilar Pavón Torrejón, Universidad de Sevilla)

At the beginning of the third century, Papinian, the syrian juristic, magister libellorum and praetorian prefect during the reing of Septimius Severus, wrote: in multis iuris nostri articulis deterior est conditio feminarum, quam masculorum (Quaest., Lib. XXXI). The sentence reflects, in my view, not only the impartiality and independence of judgment attached to this jurist, but also the situation of the Roman woman to justice, seen by one of the best and most prominent connoisseurs of Roman law.
One of the most effective forms of control, regulation of behavior and gender marginalization was done through legislation. The woman received the impact of legislative imperial policy, both in her life and in her body. However, there are examples of questions asked to the emperors by women denoting a clear initiative in expressing doubts and consultations on issues relating to the right, directly related to their interests.

Gender roles in Roman law of succession and the understanding of justice
(Elena Köstner, University of Regensburg / Heilbronn University)

The reciprocity between the individual and society touches on an intensive public interest in last wills and the acceptance by both society and the law of the "fundamental paradox" (Champlin 1989, 198–215) that the wishes of an individual who had ceased to exist should be held valid. A last will therefore was subjected to various laws. For example, Cicero (de finibus 3.64–65) stated that a man was born for society and social intercourse, wills and last wishes were born of patriotism and care for posterity. However, in Roman law of succession men and women could draw up a will, although sexes generally were treated differently. Here, I want to focus on the following aspects: The Roman law of succession was on the one hand a societal mirror just transporting social and gender role stereotypes. On the other hand it can also be understood as a mirror that reflects the meaning of justice as a moral value.

11h35 Discussion
12h05 Closing talk