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appendix a Assembling and Processing Evidence h introduction this study began as a rather conventional exploration of the generation and archiving of public laws presented at Roman lawmaking assemblies. Over time the process of organizing and arranging the often scattered information on public laws turned into a monumental project far exceeding the capabilities of the usual stack of three-by-five-inch cards used by historians. Some more effective technique for handling data was called for. A few weeks spent exploring the capabilities of Macintosh HyperCard suggested the possibilities of using my Macintosh Quadra to assist in the project.1 Fortunately not long after that most critical juncture of my research I became aware of the existence of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), in my view the most comprehensive and flexible data management system available for historical research.2 SPSS allows the historian to use information, both numerical and alphabetical, from almost any type of file to generate reports, charts, tables, and trends and gives him or her the means to rapidly edit, select, and reselect such information, thus allowing an almost unlimited exploration of possibilities for a phenomenon under examination. The overall database generated for the project included more than ten thousand items of information gleaned from all of the available proposals and end products of Rome’s public lawmaking assemblies, the roughly 780 proposals or enacted laws to which reference has survived over the entire period of 437 public lawmaking activity from 509 BCE to 98–96 CE (details on the coding of information are discussed later). The items ranged from the reported details of individual proposals and enacted laws—including dates, subjects, offices and names of public law sponsors, names of laws, and occurrence of vetoes or other obstructions—to the ancient authors or other sources of information reporting the details and the reliability of their reportage. We owe this record to an array of contemporary and derivative sources preserving unevenly the details of laws or lawmaking occasions by a variety of different individuals: historians, epitomators , antiquarians, speechwriters, biographers, jurists, and others. Sometimes the speeches for and against proposals of law have survived to document the occasion, usually in snatches of words and phrases.3 A small number of the laws enacted are known by their very words (ipsissima verba), which were engraved on bronze tablets or stone stelae or preserved in a literary or juristic text—again usually in a fragmentary state. The process of compiling the particulars of public law proposals and enacted laws, which provided the core of my database, began with the record of attested laws and proposals assembled by G. Rotondi in Leges Publicae Populi Romani (1912; reprint, 1966), supplemented and corrected by a number of other standard reference tools for Roman political history and Roman law.4 When necessary I also checked ancient sources of information, in particular to assemble information on the circumstances specific to each proposal or law. The resulting compilation of information about public law and lawmaking meetings and assemblies was processed with the help of SPSS to produce a variety of tables used throughout the text as appropriate to provide the basic framework for my discussion. Notwithstanding my deployment of SPSS this is by no means a technical study in the sense that I used statistical techniques to give new meaning to the Roman experience. Rather I used the SPSS principally as an organizational tool to assemble the evidence for my study, to explore the resulting compilation— my “database”—and to develop straightforward measures of the frequency and content of public lawmaking activity, as well as the patterns of involvement of political leaders in public lawmaking sessions and the extent to which these patterns reflected changes in historical circumstances over time in the Roman world. My study accordingly deals with the timing and context within which manifest events involved the Roman people, as opposed to more technical quantitative studies, which often use incomplete samples to uncover patterns of life, birth rates, or life expectancy, for example, findings whose recognition by the participants themselves remains to be demonstrated. Rather than statistically accurate samples, therefore, my findings depend more on historical “snapshots,” given color and depth by concrete events derived from the more 438 assembling and processing evidence conventional body of narrative, epigraphic, and legal literature available to Roman historians in conjunction with the findings of archaeological studies of Rome and Italy. Thus I seek to systematically bridge the gap between the impossible task of finding...

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