Letters of the Law: Inscriptions and the Experience of the Roman Voter

In 62 BC, the tribune Metellus Nepos proposed a law to the assembly, but was vetoed by his colleagues before he could read the text aloud to the voters. In response, he recited it from memory instead (Plut., Cat. Min. 28.1; Dio 37.43.2). Nepos’ feat of memory seems remarkable. Roman laws were dense with technical language, and long-standing consensus holds that few voters could understand much of the texts and were generally unwilling to listen patiently to the recitation of thousands of words of legal jargon while waiting to cast their ballots (Mouritsen; Flaig; Hölkeskamp). Contrary to this traditional consensus, this paper argues that magistrates did not expect voters to endure a recitation of the full texts of laws, nor were they expected to know their laws by heart. Instead, magistrates read out brief abstracts to voters to communicate the goals and purpose of their propositions. This integral, but unrecognized, aspect of Roman lawmaking encourages a significant reinterpretation of the connectivity between the voters and the elite in the crucial decisions of the Republic.

It has traditionally been thought that proposed laws (rogationes) were effectively “draft statutes” that, once passed, were “converted” into formal leges by simply changing verb forms (Crawford; Ferrary). This view holds that laws and rogationes alike would have been all but incomprehensible to semi-literate Roman voters (Frederiksen; Williamson). But our surviving rogationes—the inscribed Lex de Insula Delo and the so-called Ephesus Fragment—are certainly not drafts. These rogationes are less than one fifth the estimated full length of even the shortest surviving leges, and comparison with analogous portions of surviving laws reveals that they condensed and summarized substantially longer and more detailed provisions. Recited aloud they were only about a minute or two in length and largely avoided jargon. Like voters in modern referenda, who receive summaries to help them understand the contents of proposed laws, Roman voters had access both to the full text of the law (which was publicly posted in the forum) and a brief abstract. Voters expected lawmakers to make a genuine effort to make sure the people could understand what their decisions meant.

While Roman elites could use the texts of laws to obfuscate as much as to clarify (Morstein-Marx 2004), lawmakers whose propositions lacked clarity and conciseness lay open to accusations of deliberately confusing the people (Leg. Ag. 2.11-13). This dynamic speaks to a much greater interactivity between voters and the elite than has usually been supposed, but which is significant in light of recent scholarship on how non-elite Romans interacted with public institutions, from public inscriptions to elections (Woolf; Cooley; Graham; Morstein-Marx 2015; Yakobson). The evidence strongly challenges the view that Roman lawmaking was a one-way process in which the elite dictated terms to voters who had little understanding of what they were deciding. Instead, it speaks to our evolving understanding of inclusivity in Republican public life, wherein the Roman people were able to communicate effectively with the elite, and to influence politics on their own terms.