This article uses the evidence of the early Christian martyr acts to argue for the existence of a broader, provincial discourse on the importance of legal procedure in criminal trials in the Roman Empire. By focusing on moments of criminal confrontations, these texts not only attempted to explain and glorify the deaths of martyrs, but also sought to make sense of a process that was designed by the Roman state to be arbitrary and terrifying. In the course of their narratives, the martyr acts articulate a distinctly provincial understanding of imperial judicial procedures. They politicize this understanding in ways consequential for current scholarly models of the relations between the imperial government and provincial society more broadly.
In the middle of the second century CE, the satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. CE 125–180) composed a text known as theBis Accusatus(“Twice Accused”) in which he describes a day of judgment. It begins with Zeus complaining to Hermes about the onerous nature of running the universe:In the first place, I have to supervise the work of the other gods who have responsibilities under my regime, to make sure they don't slack in their duties. Then I have a million tasks to perform myself, scarcely manageable because of their complexity. It's not as though I simply have the major administrative tasks to perform, I mean managing and organizing the weather—rain, hail, wind, and lightning—before I can simply sit down and take a break from my assigned worries. I've got to do all this and keep a watch in all directions and supervise everything as though I were that herdsman at Nemea: people stealing, people perjuring themselves, people sacrificing. Has someone made a libation? Where's the sacrificial smell and smoke coming from? Who has called for me in sickness or at sea? But the most onerous task of all is being in so many places at the same time: Olympia for a hecatomb, Babylon for a battle, with the Getae to hail, with the Ethiopians to feast…Take an example. We're so damned busy, we've got an enormous backlog of old lawsuits not dealt with. They've been stacked there so long, they've fallen apart with mildew and they're covered in spider's webs. I'm thinking in particular about the ones taken out against certain individuals associated with the intellectual arts and crafts. Some of them are absolutely ancient. The litigants themselves are bawling on every side, grinding their teeth, calling for justice and accusing me of tardiness. What they don't realize is that it's not through contempt that these decisions have passed their sell by date. It's because of the state of bliss that they think we live in. That's the name they give to our complete lack of spare time.
This chapter attempts to provide a model for connecting the history of personal status with the history of governmentality. It traces a process that begins with intrusions of Roman citizens into the eastern provinces and ends, perhaps paradoxically, with provincial subjects asserting their rights. The two processes, the chapter argues, are connected, though not in the ways that current scholarship on citizenship might lead one to expect. The Roman state, largely for pragmatic and fiscal reasons, was highly concerned with the inequities that emerged from waves of privileged citizens acquiring large amounts of wealth and, perhaps more important, engaging in brutal behavior with respect to subject populations. Subject populations were similarly concerned and developed, in collaboration with Roman governors, a robust language for protecting their rights—the language of subjecthood.
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