The Laws of the Roman People : Public Law in the Expansion and Decline of the Roman Republic

For hundreds of years, the Roman people produced laws in popular assemblies attended by tens of thousands of voters to publicly forge resolutions to issues that might otherwise have been unmanageable. Callie Williamson's book, The Law of the Roman People, finds that the key to Rome's survival and growth during the most formative period of empire, roughly 350 to 44 B.C.E., lies in its hitherto enigmatic public lawmaking assemblies which helped extend Roman influence and control. Williamson bases her rigorous and innovative work on the entire body of surviving laws preserved in ancient reports of proposed and enacted legislation from these public assemblies.

Chapter One

Public Law in Rome

In 81, at the conclusion of a bloody civil war, the Roman people approved a bill sponsored by L. Valerius Flaccus, as interrex, making L. Cornelius Sulla "Dictator for Writing the Laws and Restoring the State" (dictator legibus scribendis et rei publicae constituendae). Sulla's first act as dictator was an innovation. By the authority of dictator granted him by the lex Valeria, Sulla posted the names of forty senators and sixteen hundred equestrians in the Forum with the directive that anyone who wished might kill with impunity the men whose names appeared there. Later more senators were added to the list. Eventually, a total of forty-seven hundred wealthy men of all ranks were proscribed and their property confiscated and sold or reassigned. The restoration of the Roman state had begun. Over the next eighteen months Sulla continued his campaign to restore order, sometimes on his own authority as dictator but often by the full process of public law requiring the sanction of the Roman people. The dictator promulgated at least twenty proposals, which the Roman people, when the scheduled day of voting arrived, in public accord embraced as law. Sulla stepped down as dictator in 80, his task completed. Thirty-four years later, in 46, C. Julius Caesar in his turn was created "Dictator for Writing the Laws and Restoring the State" during a bigger and more costly civil war. Over the next two years Caesar presented at least twelve public law proposals. Not since the Romans created a board of "ten men for writing the laws" (decemviri legibus scribendis) at the end of the fifth century had there been such intensive lawmaking efforts in Rome. But never before the dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar had public law been used so extensively and so directly to resolve specific political and social crises.

For centuries the Romans reached decisions about law relating to the most critical aspects of their society in a public process concluded in the voting assemblies of Rome. The first reported public lawmaking occasion fell in the first year of the Republic, 509, when the first consul M. Iunius Brutus, in accordance with a Senate decree, carried a measure to exile all members of the Tarquin clan. The last reported occasion of certain date occurred during the reign of the emperor Nerva, CE 96-98, when the emperor himself presented a bill assigning land to poor Romans. In between lay roughly six hundred years and 750 unevenly reported public law proposals or enacted public laws.

Over the many centuries of public lawmaking activity, the historical circumstances surrounding the production of public law are haphazardly recorded. It is paradoxical that the most famous public laws with the profoundest consequences are sometimes puzzlingly detached from precise historical circumstances. A plebiscite commonly known as the lex Aquilia de damno, for instance, dating perhaps to the early third century, between 287 (the date of the lex Hortensia making plebiscites binding on the entire Roman community) and 133-12 (the period of the Gracchi) provided the foundations for the fundamental Roman delict, or tort, dealing with wrongful damage to property, damnum iniuria datum. Roman jurists commented extensively on the meaning and application of relevant provisions of the lex Aquilia, much of their commentary surviving in the Digests, where it provides a clear measure of the importance of the lex Aquilia in the development of Roman private law. Yet we know next to nothing of the contemporary issues prompting a lawmaker possibly named Aquilius to draft and promulgate such a public law proposal and prompting the Roman plebs at some time reportedly in the first half of the third century to accept it as law. Why was this issue addressed in a public law at all, rather than by the praetor in his edict?

Another famous public law, the lex Agraria of 111, owes its celebrity primarily to the accidents of survival facing a bronze tablet on which the law was engraved in the late second century, possibly in the Roman town of Forum Sempronia (Fossombrone) in Umbria. Ceremonially displayed in a town center or temple precinct, bronze tablets engraved with laws provided a monumental record of the enactments of Rome's assemblies. Since very few such tablets have survived to the modern period, chance alone has given us a record of this single most instrumental public law in the development of Roman land tenure, the lex Agraria, that instituted momentous changes in the legal status of Roman public property (ager publicus). While the historical circumstances of the law are broadly known, precise details are lacking. The identification and content of the lex Agraria have been at issue since discovery of the bronze fragments on which it was engraved near Urbino, in north Italy, in the fifteenth century CE. In particular, scholars have been at pains to determine what precisely the lex Agraria enacted and where this law fits in the scheme of agrarian legislation of the period reported by ancient narrative sources. Who was the lawmaker? Why was such a law or indeed any of the land laws between 133 and 111 presented to the people? Why did not the Roman censors, or consuls, or indeed the Senate decide about the legal status of ager publicus in this instance as they had in other instances?

No less fundamental questions haunt even those public law sessions that are recorded in some detail, as for instance when the tribune Ti. Sempronius Gracchus in 133 promulgated a proposal to recover ager publicus in private possession and redistribute the land to poor Romans-the epochal, initial proposal in the hotly debated series culminating in the lex Agraria. The draft of his proposal had been carefully prepared by Gracchus and a council of advisors that included friends and family members, among them some of the highest-ranking senators of Rome. Gracchus's public speeches on the measure, as reported by the later historian Appian, touched on burning issues of the day: access to land resources, military manpower needs, and a slave labor force. Crowds of people came to Rome, both supporters and opponents, to be on hand when the day of the voting assembly arrived: rich men who stood to lose some of their holdings on ager publicus, long in their possession even if irregularly held; men of military age, soldiers, and ex-soldiers without land; Roman and Latin colonists and restricted-citizen inhabitants (cives sine suffragio) of municipia; and Italians interested in the disposition of such land. Inns and private accommodations could not hold all the Romans, Latins, and Italians who descended on Rome, bent on attending the outcome of the vote. Our ancient informants go on to report a complicated shuffle before Gracchus's proposal was eventually enacted. Another tribune, Octavius, vetoed the measure just as Gracchus ordered the herald to read it for the last time before calling the plebeian tribal assembly to vote; and a Senate discussion of the proposal failed to produce a formal sanction by that body. Gracchus nonetheless convened a second voting assembly at which the people first agreed, by the unanimous vote of the first eighteen tribes (tribus) declaring their decision, a majority of the thirty-five tribes present, to remove Octavius from office for his failure to support the people's interests. The people then voted to accept Gracchus's land redistribution measure, now somewhat modified, as law. The expressed will of the Roman people prevailed, recognized by Gracchus, if not by Octavius or the Roman Senate.

Despite this relatively detailed picture of the circumstances of the lex Sempronia agraria, one of the best known lawmaking events of the Roman Republic, our knowledge of the context of those circumstances is nonetheless as incomplete in several important respects as it is in the case of the lex Agraria. Attendance at Gracchus's public lawmaking sessions provides a case in point. Not only did vast numbers of people travel sometimes great distances to Rome to attend Gracchus's assembly, but they did so in some cases knowing they could not vote-in 133 the general grant of citizenship to all Italians was nearly fifty years in the future. Only citizens could enact law or elect Rome's political and military leaders in legitimately convened assemblies. Nonetheless, noncitizens as well as citizens converged on Rome in 133 to participate in the public lawmaking event sponsored by Gracchus. The participation by so large and diverse a group serves as a significant measure not only of the importance of the issues but also of the mechanism used to address those issues-a public lawmaking event. The general involvement of Romans from throughout Italy from all levels-from that of the elite Roman, a man of wealth and status if not a senator or elected official, to that of the ordinary citizen-in the public lawmaking process, especially in the years before all Italy became officially Roman at the conclusion of the Italian War, is striking. Yet, given the complexity of the rituals and procedures involved in public lawmaking assemblies, it is not axiomatic that all Romans should have a sufficiently sophisticated level of knowledge to participate effectively in public lawmaking assemblies. And it is certainly not axiomatic that newer citizens from throughout the conquered lands should participate as effectively as Romans, which they did. Such widespread involvement of participants from all levels of society throughout Italy in a complicated public lawmaking session requiring a deep knowledge of the Roman way of life has yet to be explained by historians.

THE DIMENSIONS OF LAWMAKING ACTIVITY

This book thus seeks to join public law to life in the Roman Republic throughout Italy during the years of greatest expansion, ca. 350 to 44. In this chapter my main project is to use my compilation of evidence about public law and lawmaking to focus as precisely as possible on what needs to be explained. What does the surviving evidence show about public lawmaking activity during the period in Roman history within which it was most extensively used, that is, the years from ca. 350 to 44? To begin, over the entire period of Roman public lawmaking, from roughly 509 BCE to 96 CE, reports on about 669 proposals or laws are known. But the main focus of my investigation is on our main period of interest, rather arbitrarily extended for ease of comparison by a few years at one end and divided into twenty-five-year blocks of time, as shown in table 1.1. Although cutting across the conventional periodization used by Roman historians, the table reveals some striking variations over time in the Romans' resort to public law, which are unrelated to changes in the volume of reportage. Over the quarter century from 249 to 225, for instance, Romans gathered to consider proposals of law about once every six years on average, for a total of only four occasions. Over the quarter century from 74 to 50, however, law sponsors called Romans together on 118 occasions, on average just over five times yearly. These are the extremes of Roman lawmaking activity.

The most intense lawmaking activity over our period of interest obviously falls in times of reported historical crises. The Second Punic War is fought between 218 and 201, and concurrently the number (43) of public laws for the quarter century within which it lies more than doubles any similar earlier period. Support for the thesis that the Romans existed in a constant state of crisis after 133, the beginning of the "century of revolution," is provided by a climb in the incidence of public law proposals at around that time. Lawmakers offered 68 bills, a new record, for public scrutiny over the quarter century from 124 to 100. In turn this total is almost matched by the 67 laws proposed over the following quarter century, 99 to 75, years that include the critical events of 91 to 81 and the temporary abeyance of the office of tribune. Roman law sponsors presented a record-breaking 118 laws to the Roman people from 74 to 50, a time span that brackets the slave revolt led by Spartacus between 73 and 71 and the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63. Our era of interest concludes with the third highest incidence of laws for any quarter century in Roman history, 67 laws between 49 and 25. This quarter century witnessed the first round of civil wars involving Julius Caesar and Pompey and the second round of civil wars involving Octavian and M. Antonius, that is, 44 to 31.

But what does all this mean for public lawmaking on a year-to-year basis? What could a Roman citizen expect in the way of public lawmaking events during a typical year? Arranging the incidence of lawmaking assemblies, or the absence thereof, on the basis of individual years within our selected periods, as in table 1.2, confirms the tendency toward a high rate of lawmaking during times of crises and the increasing frequency of lawmaking sessions as we approach the emergence of the Empire. Overall, as column 2 in table 1.2 indicates, for almost half (144) of all years over our period no public lawmaking sessions held the Romans' attention. For each of 79 years (column 3) the Romans participated on a single occasion in the public consideration of a law proposal, followed by two occasions per year for each of 32 years (column 4), three per year for each of 19 years (column 5), and four occasions per year for each of 11 years (column 6). In 5 years across the period Romans participated in five lawmaking sessions (column 7), and in 23 years they participated in six such sessions (column 8). Overall, in those years in which the Romans considered public law proposals (181), an average of about two and a half (2.6) laws per year were presented. All quarter-century divisions have a number of years with no lawmaking activity and a peak year in which lawmaking activity occurred many times. During the quietest quarter century, that is, 249 to 225, for 21 out of the 25 years not a single public law was proposed; at the other extreme, however, from 74 to 50, in 24 years out of 25 years, Romans participated in the public consideration of at least one law.

After 225, the patterns of public lawmaking shift significantly, as noted in table 1.2. In contrast to earlier times when Romans could expect state heralds to summon them to at most one meeting a year to hear arguments on the merits of a law proposal, now they found themselves enduring the rigorous public lawmaking process three or four times during a single year. The finer calibration in table 1.2 confirms the findings in our previous table of a relationship between crises and the incidence of public lawmaking as the Romans extend their control across Italy and the Mediterranean. Although public lawmaking follows no simple discernible pattern, the general trend is in the direction of more laws in more years for each quarter century and more laws during times of crises, as we approach the end of the Republic, by which time Romans were engaged in about five public lawmaking assemblies in a typical year. After 125, the years in which the number of law proposals climbs to six or higher are also far more frequent than earlier. Over the same period, the highest rate of law proposals in any single year ranges from thirteen in 123 to a high of nineteen laws in 44, the most we see in one year (column 9, table 1.2). Within each quarter century, except 199-175 and 174-150, there is a year of intensive lawmaking activity: 217 with six laws or proposals, 133 with seven, 123 with thirteen, 81 with eighteen, 58 with sixteen, and 44 with the historically unprecedented nineteen laws (column 9). All were years of turmoil. The years of the 50s, in which Romans participated in a remarkable seventy-two lawmaking events, and the 11 years from 91 to 80, in which lawmakers promulgated fifty-five bills, were the busiest in Roman history. Given the customary requirements for the public display and recitation of law proposals and the religious and political rituals accompanying the public passage of law, such a grueling schedule of lawmaking meetings and assemblies meant that throughout the century preceding the demise of the Republic the Roman people spent much, if not most, of their year involved in one way or another with the public lawmaking process.

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Excerpted from The Laws of the Roman People by Callie Williamson Copyright © 2005 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Frontmatter List of Tables (page XXII) List of Maps (page XXV) Abbreviations (page XXVII) PART ONE: PATTERNS AND PROCESS (page 1) CHAPTER ONE: Public Law in Rome (page 3) CHAPTER TWO: Presentation: Oratory and Law Drafts (page 62) CHAPTER THREE: Legitimization: Participants and Procedures (page 100) PART TWO: THE EXPANSION OF ROME (page 129) CHAPTER FOUR: The Conquest of Italy (page 131) CHAPTER FIVE: Incorporation: Citizenship and Military Service (page 191) CHAPTER SIX: Convergence: The City of Rome (page 239) PART THREE: THE DECLINE OF THE REPUBLIC (page 283) CHAPTER SEVEN: A Roman Balance (page 285) CHAPTER EIGHT: Crisis and Restoration, 91-70 (page 324) CHAPTER NINE: The Demise of Public Law, 69-44 (page 367) Epilogue (page 415) APPENDIX A: Assembling and Processing Evidence (page 437) APPENDIX B: Representativeness of Compilation (page 445) APPENDIX C: List of Reliable Laws and Proposals by Year, Latin Name, and Subject, 350-25 BCE (page 451) Cited Works and Select Bibliography (page 475) Index (page 495) For hundreds of years, the Roman people produced laws in popular assemblies attended by tens of thousands of voters to publicly forge resolutions to issues that might otherwise have been unmanageable. Callie Williamson's comprehensive new study finds that the key to Rome's survival and growth during the most formative period of empire, roughly 350 to 44 B.C.E., lies in its hitherto enigmatic public lawmaking assemblies which helped extend Roman influence and control. The author bases her rigorous and innovative work on the entire body of surviving laws preserved in ancient reports of proposed and enacted legislation from these public assemblies. Callie Williamson holds a Ph. D. in Roman history from the University of London and is practicing law in North Carolina For hundreds of years, the Roman people produced laws in popular assemblies attended by tens of thousands of voters to forge resolutions publicly to issues that might otherwise have been unmanageable. Callie Williamson's comprehensive study finds that the key to Rome's survival and growth during the most formative period of empire, roughly 350 to 44 B.C.E., lies in its hitherto enigmatic public law-making assemblies, which helped extend Roman influence and control. Williamson bases her rigorous and innovative work on the entire body of surviving laws preserved in ancient reports of proposed and enacted legislation from these public assemblies.