Lives behind the Laws: The World of the Codex Hermogenianus

Conclusion

159 Conclusion Ancient systems of petition and response existed around the Mediterranean with little variation for several thousand years, and that of the Roman Empire even survived its political demise. There were, I believe, several reasons for the Roman system’s longevity. First, the system was not created ex nihilo, but rather was based on traditional practices, and there were incentives for the middling sort to use it. Limited opportunities existed for people of the middling sort to find advice about their legal problems as lawyers’ advice and representation were too expensive for many, and they faced significant linguistic, social, and financial barriers to success in court. The alternative of petitioning the emperor for advice or help perhaps arose from or was analogous to the long-standing custom of calling on a patron’s legal knowledge and thus may have been more accessible in the minds of the middling sort. So, the middling sort could now not only consult a lawyer or patron but also petition the emperor and (though few may have known it) the expert members of his scrinium. A favorable rescript could help persuade opponents to settle or judges to decide in a petitioner’s favor and thus it offered significant advantages to the middling sort, especially given the availability of scribes, tabelliones, to assist them with composing a petition. Second, successive emperors, perhaps on the model of their earlier Near Eastern and Greek counterparts and certainly in emulation of Julius Caesar and Augustus, continued it, and their reputations were enhanced as a result (which stimulated them further to administer the system). I have constructed a schema of the system from close analysis of the inscribed petition and response from Skaptopara and analyzed it primarily 160 · Lives behind the Laws from the petitioner’s point of view rather than that of the court. The resulting system appears complex, and many scholars have noted its complexity in their attempts to fix its details. But few have recognized that the complexity was suffered primarily by the petitioners and most likely existed to maximize the convenience of the imperial court. When the system is studied in motion, further details about how it operated emerge, in particular the fact that members of the scrinium, who answered most of the petitions, worked to a grueling schedule, despite the system’s being designed for the court’s convenience. This system in motion, which can be recreated from examining the entries in the Codex Hermogenianus now extant in the Codex Justinianus, also reveals that the emperor did not answer all the petitions he received, but that the scrinium answered most of them, most of the time. The number of petitions handed in daily to the court throughout the year, many of which required a legally complex answer, was simply too high for the emperor to be the sole respondent. Petitioning continued while the imperial court traveled, though administration of the system was not the reason for traveling. (The court’s attention to the system, however, would have helped the image of the emperor across a wide area.) The very fact that petitioners were answered by the court on the move enables us to consider together the answers they received, their names as they were recorded, and the locations at which their rescripts were processed in order to understand better the lower Danube provinces, in particular their cultural diversity, range of commercial activities, and familial and social interactions. While I do not claim that a regional history can be written from the rescripts alone, they are a fruitful addition (and sometimes a useful corrective) to the existing archaeological and epigraphic evidence that reveals more complex and diverse communities. The makeup of the petitioners themselves is also revealed and can be quantified, as others have shown. But it may be possible to push the evidence further than quantification, and I have suggested that where numbers of petitioners from specific groups (e.g., women, slaves, and soldiers) are lower than their numbers in the general population, this is probably the result of social and practical restrictions rather than prejudice from the imperial court against answering them and compiling or codifying their answers. We may therefore use the existing rescripts to get a good sense Conclusion · 161 of the kinds of problems that beset the middling sort and various subsets of them. I hope that I have shown the case study approach, which I adopted in...