Recent scholarship on Roman law and legal institutions has raised new questions about the role that Roman law played in the ways in which people across the empire managed important aspects of their lives, as well as the efforts of the Roman administration to foster legal institutions accessible to a broad portion of the empire's population. The 22 essays in Law in the Roman Provinces provide welcome perspectives on this debate. The editors, K. Czajkowski (C.) and B. Eckhardt (E.), both from the University of Edinburgh, have themselves made their own important contributions – namely, C.'s groundbreaking study of the Babatha archive, and E.'s work on associations in the Roman world.Footnote ¹ In this volume, the editors seek to present a wholistic picture of the experience that people in the Roman Empire had of law and legal institutions – that is, as G. Merola formulates the issue in her concluding reflection, to understand the “legal reality of everyday life” (487). Part of this experience was the agency of the people in the provinces, in their response to Roman law and the rules that the Romans established for administering the law. The essays concern virtually the whole Roman Empire (outside of Italy), from Egypt and the Roman Near East to Britain. The geographic breadth of the volume means that various types of evidence are examined, from the more typical literary sources to papyri, wooden tablets, and inscriptions. But the focus on individual provinces – rather than, for example, particular legal issues – means that the evidence of the Digest and the Code of Justinian receive much less attention, being the focal point of only one essay. It is clear that many of the rescripts in the Code responded to petitions with a provincial origin, but the lack of specificity in the texts means that they generally do not provide information about a specific province.Footnote ² Moreover, the differing nature of the evidence examined in the volume makes it difficult to ask the same questions about the various provinces considered. Even so, the essays collectively provide new ways of thinking about the role of law in the Roman Empire, particularly about the interplay between Roman administrative and legal policies and local autonomy, and the ways in which the Romans fostered a legal order in the provinces based on Roman law, or at least Roman administrative policies. In what follows, I will sketch out how the individual essays shed light on these general themes.

The Roman administration's efforts to establish authoritative legal institutions took various forms, depending on local conditions and the circumstances under which territories became part of the Roman Empire. Under the Republic, as argued in a number of essays, the major task that the Romans faced was to create a legal order while maintaining local institutions, at least to the extent that they did not conflict with Roman interests. At one extreme are the dramatic changes that Roman rule brought to Africa, to judge by C. Ando's interpretation of the parts of the Lex Agraria on 111 BCE that pertained to that province (346–57). In essence, the Romans asserted their absolute authority over all the communities in the new province. Carthage was destroyed, and the cities that supported Carthage faced the loss of land to the Gracchan colonists, who would have been citizens of the abortive colony of Junonia. In the earliest years of the province, the Romans established land and capitation taxes while exercising the administration of justice from Rome by dispatching praefecti iure dicundo to Africa to hear cases involving citizens. Only the towns that had come over to the Roman side in the Third Punic War seem to have enjoyed any autonomy.

The Roman treatment of local institutions was quite different in the Greek world, where individual cities sought to preserve their autonomy as the legal authority of the governor expanded. I. Arnaoutoglou (284–312) argues that in Macedonia, the Romans assumed the prerogative previously exercised by the Macedonian kings to adjudicate disputes between cities. The degree to which an at least theoretical continuity was maintained between the Roman administration and the Macedonian kings is indicated by the reference to Philip II in a boundary stone inscription from the 2nd c. CE (SEG 39.577; p. 285). In the case of Achaia, L. Girdvainyte (210–42) explores the process of incorporating under Roman rule cities that had their own long-standing legal institutions and the inevitable tensions that arose. In this province, the key was the legal relationship that a given city had with Rome. Free cities pursued treaties of friendship with Rome after 146 BCE until the time of Augustus. Having a treaty with Rome strengthened the hand of a city when it sent an embassy to the senate in Rome to defend its interests, particularly in disputes over civic territory. At the same time, the Romans retained the federal structures that had been present in pre-Roman Greece, although now under the watchful eye of the Roman governor. As in Macedonia, the presence of Roman citizens in communities could cause complications. Often the wealthiest among them would be granted the right to own land in a city, as well as freedom from taxation, access to local courts, and the right of intermarriage (220). It is difficult to assess to what extent Roman private law might have influenced the lived experiences of peregrines in Greek cities. In both Achaia and Macedonia, it is possible to trace the intersection between traditional Greek practices and Roman policy in the case of manumissions. Under the principate, manumissions continued to be performed in terms of Greek law: the symbolic sale to a god of the slave to be manumitted (Apollo in the case of Delphi), along with provisions requiring the manumitted slave to continue to work for the former master for a set period of time (paramonē, 228). References in some of the manumissions from Macedonia to a 3rd-c. CE governor, Tertyllianus Aquila, suggest that the governor was establishing a status within Roman legal conventions for the slaves manumitted in this way (296–97 citing the Greek scholar M. Youni). In this scenario, the traditional Greek form of manumission would be interpreted as an informal manumission in Roman law, giving the newly manumitted slaves the status of Junian Latins. Another area of the law in which we might most expect Roman legal influence is bequests to towns, which often involved the intervention of the governor and drew the attention of the Roman jurists and emperor.Footnote ³

For good or ill, local elites played a crucial role in mediating the relationships between Greek cities and the Roman authorities, and on occasion, the interventions of individual citizens could be decisive. Such influence can be seen quite clearly in the case of Mytilene on Lesbos, as discussed by A. Dimopoulou (267–83). Mytilene's favorable treatment by the Romans resulted from the efforts of two of its leading citizens: Theophanes, the historian who became a close ally of Pompey, and the philosopher and orator Potamon a generation later. Theophanes helped Mytilene to regain its status as a free city that it had lost after supporting Mithridates in the 80s BCE. After Pompey's defeat in 48 BCE, Potamon worked to establish relations with Caesar, and ultimately helped to have the Roman senate define the property rights of landowners at Mytilene. Both individuals received significant honors at Mytilene, and Theophanes's descendants became members of the Roman senate. On Crete, as I. Tzamtzis argues, local autonomy can be seen in the law codes from Gortyn and other cities, which were reinscribed under Roman rule (243–66). The Gortynian laws included ancient provisions pertaining to family law that apparently remained in force with Rome. From a different perspective, the Digest preserves a rescript of Hadrian to the proconsul of Crete and Cyrene concerning the Roman institution of tutorship (Ulp. Dig. 48.16.14; p. 254). If this rescript was directed at Roman citizens, the Gortynian laws might suggest some wide divergence between the family law that applied to peregrines on the island as opposed to Roman citizens. Some communities in Crete were also able to retain communal ownership of some of their land, much of which became private land, as happened throughout the empire.

The letters that Pliny exchanged with the emperor Trajan while governor of Pontus-Bithynia provide fertile ground for investigating the difficult task that a governor might face when dealing with local elites, as analyzed by G. Kantor (185–209). Like all governors, Pliny surely received a continuous stream of petitions from people in the provinces, and he handled the vast majority of these without ever consulting Trajan, thereby providing an effective shield between the population of the province and the emperor (190–91). The types of cases that would compel Pliny to seek confirmation of his policies were high-profile ones, such as the prosecution by Flavius Archippus and Claudius Eumolpus of Dio of Prusa over the handling of building accounts; this prosecution came in apparent reprisal for the early prosecutions of Flavius Archippus. Pliny's famous exchange of letters with Trajan on the Christians suggests the circumstances under which a governor would seek the advice of the emperor; in this case, Pliny sought approval for his legal innovation of releasing accused Christians if they renounced their faith. Pliny seems to have had a continuous dialogue with local town councils over many issues as cities jealously guarded their freedom and autonomy. He also had to deal with an emperor cautious in creating new law, as is seen in his unwillingness to establish a clear-cut policy for foundlings in the province, or, for that matter, for Christians.

To some extent, the concern of Pliny and other governors with local elites may be an artifact of the type of evidence that comes down to us, but the Roman policy of respecting local institutions surely helped to maintain a class hierarchy in the Greek world. The situation was very different in Egypt, where the Romans developed a more centrally administered system of justice, which encouraged people to submit petitions to officials with various degrees of authority, including the strategoi of the nomes and the prefects. A frequent theme of these petitions in Egypt, recently analyzed by B. Kelly and A. Bryen, is the abusive behavior of more powerful people in the community, who might intrude upon the petitioner's property and treat the petitioner with “violence” (βία, or vis), a term that seems primarily to mean that the accused person acted without legal justification.Footnote ⁴ One might hypothesize that ordinary residents of Egypt had readier access to the protection of governmental officials, given that in the Greek provinces, such disputes would be handled by judicial apparatuses of town councils consisting of the wealthiest people in the community. The Roman imperial government sought to counter the influence of the well connected by providing avenues for appeal to the emperor – avenues that likely increased in importance over time. Kantor cites a rescript of Alexander Severus, quoted by the jurist Paul (Dig. 49.1.25), in which the emperor seeks to safeguard the right of appeal for people against the interference of or intimidation by imperial procurators or governors.

Criminal law remained a focal point in the struggle to maintain local autonomy in the face of Roman authority, as C. Brélaz discusses in his chapter on the province of Asia (157–84). In theory, the division of responsibilities over criminal law were clear cut in the Roman Empire. The Roman governor alone had the authority to try capital cases, and maintaining security in his province was among the governor's basic responsibilities. But in Asia at least, in the absence of substantial military forces in the province, there was a real limit to the degree of policing that the Roman administration could provide, and so it relied on local communities to carry out many functions. The tensions that inevitably arose can be seen in the efforts to rein in local authorities by the emperor Hadrian as well as by then future emperor Antoninus Pius while he was proconsul of Asia, as discussed by the Severan jurist Marcian (Dig. 48.3.6 pr.–1). The bone of contention concerned the status of criminals whom local communities turned over to the governor for prosecution. As governor, Antoninus Pius provided a detailed set of orders limiting the capacity of local authorities to adjudicate crimes, a responsibility that was to remain the governor's. In an ideal world, such oversight protected people in the province from abusive arrests at the hands of local authorities, and it also served to assure, to the extent possible, that trials would be free of political influence. One area of the criminal law in which towns successfully exercised their own initiative was in combating brigandage. To meet such an emergency, they could recruit ephebes who had recently completed their studies in the local gymnasium into a paramilitary force (171–75).

The fragility of the Roman system of administering justice can be seen by the numerous inscriptions commemorating petitions to the emperor during the late 2nd and 3rd c. CE by various communities in Asia Minor, a topic that Brélaz addresses (175–79).Footnote ⁵ The emperor was called upon again and again to resolve conflicts among cities, imperial tax officials, procurators representing the Fiscus, farmers on imperial property, and the governor. Part of the problem was making sure that local officials understood what Roman policies were, as discussed by U. Huttner (137–56). Huttner cites as an example of his theme the sacrae litterae, a communication from the emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla in 204 CE concerning the exemption of senatorial estates from the duty to provide hospitium for soldiers. There were multiple copies of this letter, in both Latin and Greek, published in Asia, which referred to the original senatus consultum that established the policy but also lamented the apparent ignorance of the local functionaries charged with enforcing it.

In provinces composed of Greek city states, the Romans found ready-made institutions that they could adapt, and the political institutions provided the basis for a system of government oriented around property qualifications and the performance of liturgies. Adapting Roman legal institutions to other provinces in the East proved to be more of a challenge. In Egypt, as A. Jördens (19–31) discusses, the Romans inherited Egyptian law and courts, as well as Greek institutions. But over time, the Romans substantially transformed the administration of the law and the political organization of the province. Jördens sees the Roman administration, motivated by the common cultural background of the prefects and the staffs that assisted them in deciding cases, as occasionally modifying the law to match notions of justice shared more broadly in the empire. One example of this is the prohibition of male circumcision, a practice generally shunned in broader Roman society but with exceptions made for certain priesthoods. In Jördens's understanding, the Roman authorities in Egypt could be responsive to local needs and initiatives. As an example, she cites the edict of Tiberius Julius Alexander, who reported that he initiated reforms in response to requests sent to him by various constituencies in Egypt. A more difficult problem in Egypt was to provide adequate definitions of status in a society with a diverse population enjoying different rights, as U. Yiftach explores (32–43). Such definitions had important implications for many aspects of life, including the obligation to perform liturgies as well as family law, where the main differences among various legal definitions would involve how marriage and the dowry were defined, and also how property would pass from one generation to the next.

While among the Egyptians, the Romans modified the law depending on civic status. In the case of Jewish subjects, the Romans granted considerable autonomy in administering their own affairs, especially those involving family law. K. Czajkowski explores this theme in the first of her two chapters on Judaea (84–100). Such toleration continued into late antiquity. Consequently, the eastern emperor Arcadius enacted legislation defining the competencies of Jewish tribunals (C.Th. 2.1.10, Cod. Iust. 1.9.8, 398 CE; p. 84), whereas Jewish rabbis asserted the authority of their own courts over gentile ones, including Roman ones. But the Babatha archive indicates that Jews who did not reside in the province of Judaea might avail themselves of the protection of Roman legal institutions, because Babatha used the Roman form of tutorship to protect the property of her son Jesus. C.'s analysis raises the question of whether the Rabbinic tradition together with the Torah and the Talmud would discourage Jews from using Roman legal forms in matters of property and contracts.

In contrast to the Greek East, in many regions in the West and along the Danube, the Romans created their own legal order, with Roman private law as its basis. This can especially be seen in the case of the municipal laws in Spain, first promulgated under Caesar and then revised and issued to many cities that were made municipia with Latin rights under the Flavian emperors. In such cities, the Romans developed norms for Roman private law that would apply to Latins, as D. Nörr has argued in his analysis of the treatment of the law of tutorship in the Flavian municipal laws.Footnote ⁶ In their complementary chapters on these laws, W. Eck (315–31) and B. Eckhardt (417–35) vividly demonstrate both the reach of Roman law in the provinces they consider and the ideological implications of this. With respect to the second matter, evidence for the laws themselves comes from bronze tablets, on which each municipality inscribed – at considerable expense – various aspects of the town's constitution, including how justice would be administered. At Irni in Spain, where the most complete version of the Flavian law was found, the town inscribed the Lex Irnitana on a wall 9 m long; at Troesmis (Romania) along the Danube, where a more fragmentary municipal law from about a century later (177–80 CE) has been uncovered, the wall would have been 50 m long (320). As Eck argues, the new municipia and coloniae in the Danube region were created at the sites of old military camps. Veterans would have ranked among the wealthiest residents of the towns, the citizens of which would also have been recruited from the local provincials. From an ideological standpoint, the laws proclaimed to the town a Roman way of life: e.g., voting, judges, oaths, and, perhaps most importantly, obligations to the community (324).

Eckhardt's chapter examines the ways in which Roman law affected the lived experiences of people in the Danubian provinces, as revealed most clearly in two examples. At the Municipium Flavia Solva in Noricum (in southeastern Austria), an inscription from the Severan age honoring the pater of a collegium centonariorum – an association of people involved in the manufacture and sale of clothing – shows the importance of Roman forms of social organization, with their attendant privileges and obligations, to the life of a town (418–23). From a different perspective, in the mining district Alburnus Maior in Dacia, on the wax tablets preserving contracts for slave sales in the period 139–167 CE, one finds people who were not Roman citizens using Roman forms of contracting (423–28). The contracts do not include a formal stipulation – something by law legally valid only for Roman citizens – but they do include guarantees about the qualities of the slave modeled on the edict of the aediles for sales of slaves. In addition, the sales are framed as mancipations, a uniquely Roman form of transfer of ownership, the usefulness of which in a provincial setting might be doubtful. Recently T. Terpstra has focused on these sales as an indication of the way in which commercial transactions might be “embedded” in terms of Roman law to enhance compliance.Footnote ⁷ But Eckhardt is surely correct that the people at Alburnus Maior opted for Roman forms of contract as the best way to spell out their rights and obligations, and it also seems clear that, if a dispute over a contract ever wound up in court, it would surely be judged in terms of Roman law.

Communal religious rituals were part of the legal order that the Romans fostered. As M. Strothmann discusses in her paper on municipal cults in Spain (332–45), the municipal laws invest a town's duoviri and council with the authority to take charge of public cults, which generally involved the Capitoline Triad. Strothmann argues that the municipal laws in Spain left room for the private celebration of indigenous cults, which Roman legal order did not cause to disappear. To return to Ando's paper on Africa, his discussion of a lex sacra from imperial Carthage suggests how the worship of local and imperial deities could be combined; in this case, the Capitoline Triad was to be worshipped as part of a celebration directed to other deities – in all likelihood, the Cereres, a Roman name for indigenous deities.

The use of Roman legal forms by peregrines in Alburnus Maior points to a major issue in any analysis of the legal experience of people in the Roman provinces – namely, the extent to which Roman private law influenced the ways in which people entered into contracts as well as the adjudication of disputes in provincial courts. To be sure, the use of Roman legal forms would increase after the Constitutio Antoniniana (CA) of 212 CE. J. L. Alonso (44–64) explores the implications of near universal Roman citizenship for the development of private law in the eastern provinces. Alonso argues that the CA could hardly have abruptly changed the ways in which people defined their property rights and family relationships. For example, in the law of sale, Roman law defines the obligations of the buyer and seller as arising from their mutual consensus, whereas in Greek law, the obligations begin when the object sold passes into the possession of the buyer. Such differences may seem subtle, but they would define how disputes would be resolved in a court. From another perspective, the emperor Alexander Severus issued a rescript in 223 CE upholding the traditional Roman principle of allowing married people to divorce freely, so that any agreement that inhibited one party in a marriage to seek a divorce would be legally unenforceable (Cod. Iust. 8.38.2). The problem is that penalties for “unjust repudiation” were a common feature of Greek marriage contracts (54–55). It is not clear how such differences might be resolved. Still, Roman forms do become parts of contracts in the Greek East, such as a written form of a stipulation, which was commonly added to contracts, even when – in terms of conventional Roman law – they were not needed (58). To the material Alonso considers, one could add the reliance of petitioners in a land dispute from the Syrian town of Appadana (to be discussed below) on constitutions by Roman emperors. The choice to adopt Roman forms would be guided by the professional scribes who prepared contracts, because they would be in the position to know how best to protect the interests of their clients, particularly when a dispute arose that could potentially lead to a court case.Footnote ⁸

T. Chiusi's paper on the Babatha archive (101–14) provides an excellent case study of how a Roman contractual form might be adapted for what was almost certainly a common practice in the provincial agrarian economy. The paper concerns Babatha's sale of the date crop from a palm grove to a certain Simon son of Jesus, dated September 11, 130 CE. The land in question, over which Babatha held a lien, had belonged to her deceased husband, Judas. Chiusi interprets the document as the sale of a future crop, emptio rei speratae. There is a difference between Babatha's sale and the conventional Roman sale, in that the price is not to be paid in cash but in fixed amounts of various types of dates, with the purchaser obliged to pay cash equivalents if he fails to deliver the specified amounts of the crop. Advance sales of crops are well known in the Roman world. Examples include Cato's sale of an olive crop (Agr. 146) and Pliny's sale of the vintage from his Tuscan estates (Ep. 8.2), and in the case of Cato at least (and possibly also with Pliny), the purchaser took over the responsibility to process the crop. Such sales are also documented in the papyri, particularly for wine. The framing of penalties for default in terms of stipulations looks forward to the practice that Alonso sees after the promulgation of the CA. But it is important to recognize that the interaction of Roman law and local law is not a one-way street. Rather, sales like this were a common way for landowners to exploit their holdings, so it seems likely that many a provincial practice found its way into conventional Roman law. For example, in Egypt, as shown by É. Jakab, sales in advance of the vintage were crucial in providing cultivators with the funds they needed to produce wine. Such sales fall outside of Roman legal conventions, because the purchaser would acquire ownership before taking possession. This arrangement makes sense, however, because the cultivator/seller would be in the best position to assure the quality of the wine after harvesting and pressing the grapes. But such sales became recognized as legally enforceable in Roman law, as a rescript from Diocletian indicates (Cod. Iust. 4.49.12).Footnote ⁹ The sale of a date crop, such as the sales of wine that Jakab analyzes, suggests the way in which practical provincial arrangements could influence Roman law.

We can see the tension between local legal traditions and Roman rules in K. Czajkowski's second paper in the volume (115–33), which is on Roman law in Dura-Europos and the middle Euphrates during the 3rd c. CE. Many of the influences of Roman legal forms that Alonso sees more generally in the East in the wake of the CA are documented at Dura-Europos, including the use of the stipulation to create obligations in contracts. But family law seems to have been a different matter. For example, P. Dura 12 (225–50 CE) presents very different rules of succession from those in conventional Roman law. C. makes the attractive argument that descendants of the original Macedonian settlers asserted their own rules for succession to preserve their property intact within their own community in a world in which they were surrounded by what were to them foreign elements. The papyri from Dura-Europos, as C. points out, can usefully be studied alongside the papyri from the middle Euphrates, where the adoption of Roman legal forms is apparent, for example, in a petition from cultivators on an imperial property at the village of Beth Phouraia, in the territory of the town of Appadana in Syria (P.Euphr. 1). The bone of contention in this case concerned rights to land, and we should imagine that this was one of the most common sorts of disputes from the rural world. With the spread of citizenship and the presence of a Roman provincial administration, we should expect such disputes to be resolved in terms of Roman conventions, such as deeming one party to be a lawful possessor and therefore entitled to remain on the land pending the final verdict of a court.

At the opposite end of the empire, in Britain, there is also evidence for the adoption of Roman legal forms, albeit under very different circumstances, as discussed by P. du Plessis (436–61). In contrast to other western provinces, there were relatively few cities in Roman Britain – at least cities that had the status of municipia or coloniae – so there was a more restricted scope for the implementation of Roman law. However, the limited evidence that does survive, primarily from wooden tablets from Vindolanda in the north of England and similar material that has been uncovered in excavations in the south, does point to the ways in which people adopted Roman law. A letter from the Vindolanda tablets, dated c. 100 CE, documents an ongoing business relationship involving commerce in hides. The writer expresses concern to his business partner that he will lose the earnest money (arra) that he has paid in connection with a prospective deal. In Roman law, at least technically, the purchaser would not forfeit the arra, as du Plessis points out. But this seems to be an example of adopting and – to some extent altering – a Roman legal form in a provincial setting, much as what happened with the stipulation and guarantees in slave sales. In fact, Britain does preserve such a slave sale, termed a mancipatio, with guarantees based on the aediles’ edicts (449–50).

So far, we have been considering the adoption and alteration of Roman legal rules in the provinces, but there are also Roman legal institutions that are associated primarily with the provinces rather than with Rome and Italy. One of these is the longi temporis praescriptio, a principle that protected good-faith possessors of provincial land against rival claims for 10 years if a claim was raised in the same city as the property in question, and for 20 years if the claim came from elsewhere. The earliest explicit documentation of the longi temporis praescriptio comes from one of the apokrimata of Septimius Severus and Caracalla, a collection of rescripts issued by the two emperors during their visit to Egypt in 199 CE. E. Plisecka (65–83) seeks to place this principle in a broader context of Roman law rather than seeing it as an innovation of Septimius Severus. It has been thought that this prescription was created in the aftermath of the Antonine plague, when there may have been considerable disruption of landownership in Egypt and in other provinces.Footnote ¹⁰ Plisecka sees this legal principle that became a foundation of the law of property in the provinces as having its roots in classical Roman law. The jurist Iavolenus (Dig. 41.3.21) asserts that someone possessing land while acting intentionally as heir could not establish ownership against the claims of the true owner on the basis of a longi temporis praescriptio. Julian (apud Ulp. Dig. 12.2.13.1) and Gaius (Dig. 21.2.54 pr.) also refer to a longi temporis praescriptio in connections with disputes over land. Plisecka's paper provides insight into the way in which the Roman administration might adapt long-standing rules in Roman law to address significant legal issues in the provinces.

The importance of rhetoric and law in the education and careers of elite Romans points to the intellectual infrastructure supporting Roman legal institutions in the provinces. A. Dolganov (358–416) shows how important legal education was for the aspiring provincial elite in North Africa by tracing the careers of legal practitioners, because they were commemorated in honorific inscriptions or epitaphs. Inscriptions commemorating legal practitioners become more frequent in the Severan period, when expertise in the law became a significant aspect of elite self-representation. Dolganov's practitioners were people who had – or at least aspired to – public careers, often beginning by pleading cases on behalf of their hometowns and eventually serving as legal advisers (assessores) in the governor's court, with a few achieving equestrian status and pursuing careers in the imperial service. Africa was clearly not the only province where legal expertise could lead to a public career. For example, a Greek epitaph from Sicca Veneria (CIL VIII 1640 = 15876) commemorates Pinnius Justus of Amastris (in Pontus), who served as assessor of the governor of Numidia, Ulpius Arabianus, who was likewise from Pontus. Sadly, Pinnius Justus died while on the job, c. 200 CE, at the age of 37 (365).

Finally, M. Wibier's chapter (462–85) provides insight into the nature of the legal education that Dolganov's practitioners received. Wibier's paper focuses on the Fragmenta Augustodunensia (FA), a 5th-c. manuscript of what was likely a textbook based largely on Gaius and written in the 3rd c. or early 4th c. at the very latest. It seems likely that there were many such manuals circulating in the West (perhaps also in the East, to judge by the Pontic assessor Pinnius Justus discussed above). In Wibier's model, which seems convincing, training in Roman law was an essential part of the education of forensic lawyers, whereas the work in such areas as drawing up contracts and developing new forms to accommodate the needs of users was in the hands of scribes. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence for the work of scribes in Gaul. The best evidence for such work comes from wooden tablets discovered in Gaul and along the Rhine, which suggest the use of Roman legal forms, such as stipulations and triptychs (475–80).

Together, the essays in this volume provide an impressive survey of the legal culture of the Roman Empire, and they should inspire more research into the legal experiences of people across the empire. The chapters on the Greek world are particularly illuminating of the continued conflict between Roman administrative policies and the efforts of individual cities to maintain their own autonomy. But there are numerous questions concerning law and legal institutions in the provinces in the empire that offer opportunities for future research. One would be the extent to which Roman notions of property, particularly as regards land, came into conflict with and eventually displaced local traditions. To consider family law, the famous case of Dionysia (P.Oxy. II 237, 186 CE) suggests how contemporary Roman concerns to restrict the father's role in marriage could affect the decision of a case in an Egyptian court. It would be interesting to explore comparable influences of Roman policy in other areas of the law, such as tutorship, vitally connected as it was with maintaining the financial resources of town councils. Tracing such influence is a difficult task, but the many rescripts of emperors to petitioners representing a wide variety of statuses in the Code of Justinian offer clues to addressing such issues. Finally, it remains a major area of debate whether the Romans developed legal institutions that reached beyond the elite to offer legal protections to a broad section of the empire's population. This is not to deny that Roman institutions could be oppressive to local populations, but there were also efforts by the Roman authorities to check this oppression. The present volume shows how complex but vital the task is of analyzing people's lived experience of the law for understanding the fundamental nature of the Roman Empire.