Full Description
Roman law is justly famous, but what was its relationship to governing an empire? In this book, Ari Z. Bryen argues that law, as the learned practice that we know today, emerged from the challenge of governing a diverse and fractious set of imperial subjects. Through analysis of these subjects' political and legal ideologies, Bryen reveals how law became the central topic of political contest in the Roman Empire. Law offered a means of testing legitimacy and evaluating government, as well as a language for asking fundamental political questions. But these political claims did not go unchallenged. Elites resisted them, and jurists, in collaboration with emperors, reimagined law as a system that excluded the voices of the governed. The result was to separate, for the first time, 'law' from 'society' more broadly, and to define law as a primarily literate and learned practice, rather than the stuff of everyday life.
Contents
1. Introduction; The Rhetoric of Inclusion; Part I. Law as Documents: 2. Becoming the Roman Provinces; 3. Arguing from Archives; Part II. Law as Dialogue: 4. Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Logos; 5. Law among the Degraded; The Practices of Exclusion; Part III. Law as Ecstasy: 6. The Transcendent Body Politic; 7. The Politics of Amazement; Part IV. Law as Books: 8. Writing about Governance, from Cicero to Ulpian; 9. Radical Bureaucracy; Epilogue: Why Premodernity?; Bibliography; Index.
