Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World

Abstract

Greeks wrote mostly on papyrus, but the Romans wrote solemn religious, public and legal documents on wooden tablets often coated with wax. This book investigates the historical significance of this resonant form of writing; its power to order the human realm and cosmos and to make documents efficacious; its role in court; the uneven spread - an aspect of Romanization - of this Roman form outside Italy, as provincials made different guesses as to what would please their Roman overlords; and its influence on the evolution of Roman law. An historical epoch of Roman legal transactions without writing is revealed as a juristic myth of origins. Roman legal documents on tablets are the ancestors of today's dispositive legal documents - the document as the act itself. In a world where knowledge of the Roman law was scarce - and enforcers scarcer - the Roman law drew its authority from a wider world of belief.

The Institutions of Roman Markets

“…It is true that Romans lacked paper and printing, and relied for recordkeeping on perishable media, such as whitewashed boards and wax tablets (Rhodes 2013). However, their reliance on wax tablets for all sorts of important documents and archiving seems to have been a choice (Meyer 2004), as they also made frequent use of papyrus imported from Egypt, especially in the East (Bagnall 2010), and more generally for the administration of the Empire (Innis 1950). The use of papyrus could have reduced the costs of registries, but sealed wooden tablets seemingly offered greater protection against fraud by tampering (Meyer 2004:2), so were harder to refute in court than other documents (Meyer 2004:219, 226).…”

“…However, their reliance on wax tablets for all sorts of important documents and archiving seems to have been a choice (Meyer 2004), as they also made frequent use of papyrus imported from Egypt, especially in the East (Bagnall 2010), and more generally for the administration of the Empire (Innis 1950). The use of papyrus could have reduced the costs of registries, but sealed wooden tablets seemingly offered greater protection against fraud by tampering (Meyer 2004:2), so were harder to refute in court than other documents (Meyer 2004:219, 226). Moreover, a basic facilitating factor was probably a level of literacy that is believed to have been high not only among the upper class (Harris 1989) but also among lower-class participants in economic transactions (Haeussler 2013).…”

Normative intersections and the poetics of hybridity in Cratinus’ Chirons

“…4 Darbo-Peschanski (2010) elabora interesantes bases conceptuales que justifican la aplicación de la dimensión "normativa" al caso de la antigüedad grecorromana. Retoma, en este sentido, las apreciaciones ya propuestas por Meyer (2004).…”

Law after Anthropology: Object and Technique in Roman Law

“…16 This might be just too austere for some tastes. For example, whereas Riles's ethnography of trading rooms in Japanese banks identifies legal technique as an effect of the articulation of documents, legal formulae, and devices such as fictions or notions of 'instrumentality', Thomas says very little about the material dimensions of legal technique, notably the documents (or, more precisely, the tabulae, parchments, and codices) that were essential to the operation of legal procedures (see generally Meyer, 2004). But in a sense this limitation is the object of the exercise.…”