Law as Narrative: Negotiating provincial identities in the early Roman Empire
By Rafail Zoulis, Yale University
This paper examines the ways provincials used the practices, documents, and spaces of Roman law to articulate their local civic identities in the early empire. Provincial communities routinely dispatched embassies to the emperors and his officials to safeguard existing civic privileges, request new ones, or engage in litigation.
It´s Who You Know. Co-freedmen Networks & Legal Knowledge in the Campanian Wax Tablets
By Alex Cushing, Loyola University Maryland
Some few hundred wax tablets were preserved in various locations around the Bay of Naples by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius of 79 CE. These included the larger archives of the auctioneer and businessman L. Caecilius Iucundus of Pompeii and the Sulpicii, formerly-enslaved members of a creditary and banking firm based at Puteoli, as well as various smaller personal archives from Herculaneum. These tablets recorded different legal and financial procedures and transactions.
Loan Sharks in the Aegean Sea: Legal Culture and Epigraphy on Amorgos
By Josh Allbright, University of Southern California
This paper seeks to offer a new interpretation of a series of loan inscriptions (IG XII, 7 63-70) from the city of Arcesine on Amorgos and what they reveal about legal culture in the Aegean islands. The island of Amorgos has historically been considered both geographically and epigraphically peripheral among the Cyclades and has thus received less attention than other islands such as Paros and Delos. Yet a peculiar collection of loan agreements from the island warrants more attention.
Last Wills and Hellenistic Statehood: the Testament of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (SEG IX 7)
By Luke De Boer, Billkent University
In this paper, I will discuss the Testament of Ptolemy VIII as a document whose conceptual implications allow for a renewed reflection on the problem of statehood and constitutional law. I shall argue that the testament articulates a concept of the state modelled on the legal institution of the will: used to dispose of one’s personal possessions after death, the will offered the conceptual means with which the state could be presented as entirely belonging to, even coinciding with, the sovereign.
Penalties for Officials in Athenian Inscribed Decrees
By Edward Jones, University of Oxford
This paper discusses penalties for officials recorded in inscribed Athenian laws of the classical period. At a basic level, it assesses what those penalties can tell us about Athenian accountability procedures.