Law as Narrative: Negotiating Provincial Identities in the Early Roman Empire (20 min)

Presenters

Rafail Zoulis, Yale University

Abstract

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. Indeed, scholars have utilized these embassies and the respective imperial responses to produce taxonomies of legal status enjoyed by various cities, to demonstrate the character of Roman administration, or to showcase their role in perpetuating imperial ideology. However, limited attention has been paid to the ambassadors’ legal arguments or their implications on the provincial landscape. Treating law as a space for the articulation of the self and the negotiation of social relations, this paper explores two epigraphically attested provincial embassies, Chios’s deputation to a proconsul of Asia (???????????? 22:507) and Maroneia’s delegation to Claudius (???????????? 53:659), as case studies for the expression of provincial identities and local histories.

The first section examines the articulation and ultimate intermingling of local and imperial history in the ambassadors’ legal argumentation. Pleading to Claudius in 46 C.E., the Maroneian envoys did not put forth positivist legal claims but rather offered an extensive narration of their city’s services to the empire, namely the early alliance with Rome in 178 B.C.E. as well as the siege and destruction of the town by Mithridatic forces in 88/87 B.C.E. Similarly, arguing to an Augustan governor, the Chians alluded to their island’s mistreatment during the First Mithridatic War. Thus, such narratives justified the grant of legal privileges on the basis of particular visions of provincial identity and reconfigured local histories as integral parts of the imperial project. The second section turns to the utilization of legal documentation in formulating these narratives. Appealing to treaties, senatus consulta, and imperial constitutiones, the Thracian and Chian envoys demonstrate the provincials’ knowledge and employment of Roman administrative practices of validating, archiving, and producing documents in their efforts to restrain and even guide the actions of imperial officials. The third section briefly explores the implications of epigraphically commemorating the successful responses. In the highly competitive provincial landscape, the inscribing and conspicuous display of positive imperial decisions alongside the legal-historical narratives that supported them showcased the cities’ privileged relation to the empire vis-à-vis their regional neighbors, but also contributed to the gradual formation of a physical memoryscape of local history through legal documents, akin to Aphrodisias’s famous archive wall.

Such synthesis of Roman law, local history, and provincial identities has significant implications. First, rather than an autonomous field constructed by jurists and imperial officials, Roman law appears as a socially embedded arena for the presentation and contestation of the self among multiple actors. Second, by grounding administrative privileges in historical claims, these two inscriptions showcase the participation of legal practices and documents in the development of simultaneously local and imperial identities.

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