The Impact of Empire network is less a research collaboration in the traditional sense than it is a funding scheme – and I mean that as a real compliment. Since 2000 Impact of Empire has brought together Imperial historians from a variety of subfields to discuss some of the biggest problems in our discipline; the volumes that these discussions produce are less sustained engagements with a specific phenomenon than wide-ranging introductions to Imperial historiography tout court. The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire is no exception to this rule; scholars who are approaching Roman law from different disciplinary orientations will find the volume enormously useful as a snapshot of the literature and as a guide to other, necessarily more sustained engagements with the problems that literature presents. If this sounds dismissive, that is not my intention; the Impact of Empire series serves an important role within the ecosystem of Roman history. But that role is an idiosyncratic one, and it makes traditional review difficult. The volume is not a book anyone should read at the end of their research process (its purview is too broad for that), but it is an excellent introduction to a branch of scholarship that is making itself increasingly important to research into Roman intellectual and social life.
Specifically, the book introduces readers to a subfield sometimes called ‘Roman law and society’. Rather than examining law as a set of doctrines and ideal rules to be studied in isolation or used as a model code, the authors of this volume instead consider law as a set of interactions, performances and intellectual processes – saturated with meaning both in a normative sense (smartly advertised by the volume's title, which replaces law with the far more freighted terminology of Justice) and in their impact on the day-to-day lives of those who witnessed and participated in their embodiments. In short, this volume considers law as it existed in the world and not in a textbook. That was not an unheard-of approach in 2017, to be clear: the book builds on important volumes like 2002's Speculum Iuris: Roman Law as a Reflection of Social and Economic Life in Antiquity (edd. J.-J. Aubert and B. Sirks), 2007's Beyond Dogmatics: Law and Society in the Roman World (edd. J.W. Cairns and P.J. du Plessis) and 2010's Spaces of Justice in the Roman World (ed. F. de Angelis), to say nothing of monographs by, inter alia, L. Bablitz, A. Bryen, S. Connolly and Impact contributor C. Ando. In other words, the volume does not seek to define its field so much as synthesise it and render the dizzying volume of scholarship it has produced legible to a non-specialist. That legibility is perhaps especially important for Roman law, a field long abandoned to its technicians. Law was a language Romans used to understand and speak about their world, and the great promise of the scholarly trend within which this volume has situated itself is to bring the insights of legal studies to Romanists of all stripes and subfields seeking to understand better that world.
The volume consists of twelve chapters, loosely organised into three sections. After an introduction by the editors, Part 1, ‘The Emperor and Justice’, considers the role of the emperor within Roman legal culture, in particular as a tool to think with or figure to represent. First, S. Benoist and A. Gangloff discuss the role of iustitia in the schematics of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperor that proliferated throughout the Principate. F. Bono raises a smart question about legal stability in the teetering autocracy of the Dominate; how can law retain its coherence when it springs from the judgment of an emperor who could be killed or condemned at any time? E. Daalder considers how the jurist Paul portrays Septimius Severus as an archetypically wise judge in his books of decrees and imperial sententiae, suggesting that these texts may have served largely – or even primarily – as venues for imperial representation. The final chapter of this Part is by M. Wibier, who uses the Fragments of Autun to explore how legal educators reacted to the centralisation of legal production in the later Empire. A common theme in the volume is that these contributions are persuasive, but perhaps most useful as an introduction to their authors’ scholarly methods and interests. Benoist's contribution reflects decades of thoughtful work on imperial representation and power, here applied to law; and readers intrigued by Wibier's sophisticated approach to Roman legal education, and in particular his comfort with non-traditional sources, will eagerly await his monograph on the subject (forthcoming from Oxford). I should especially single out, however, the chapter written by Daalder. Daalder is a rising star in Roman legal history and has previously only published on that subject in Dutch; her contribution is a sharp and thoughtful treatment of some of the texts discussed at greater length in her monograph, De rechtspraakverzamelingen van Julius Paulus. Recht en rechtvaardigheid in de rechterlijke uitspraken van keizer Septimius Severus (2018). As a distillation of what will be an important voice in Roman law, this chapter alone is worth the price of admission – or would be, were that price not set by Brill.
The next Part, ‘Justice in a Dispersed Empire’, moves from law in the mind to law on the ground, and particularly to problems of legal coherence in the pluralist, highly federalised Principate. J.M. Cortés-Copete begins the Part by comparing the vision of Roman justice that survives in Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (totalising, unified, central) with the more complicated reality of Hadrian's legal reforms. F. Hurlet next analyses a broad selection of sources for imperial adjudication, showing formal diversity undergirded by a rhetoric of regular and predictable ‘justice’ that was itself one of the primary tools by which the central state claimed legitimacy in provincial settings. C. Ando then returns us to the Denkwelt of Roman law and in particular to its pre-Severan history, excavating a sophisticated distinction between procedural and substantive theories of justice that extends much further back than scholars have previously thought and which complicates the traditional view of early Roman law as a hyper-formalist monstrosity. P. Herz (no relation) concludes the Part by discussing the Roman state's inability to control local elites or effectively monopolise police powers without local collaboration – while this inability will come as no surprise to those with a background in Roman justice, it is nevertheless a useful corrective to the more naïve visions of empire one sometimes encounters. Once more, these contributions should perhaps be best understood as advertisements for more sustained work: I think in particular of Ando's 2015 book Roman Social Imaginaries, which readers who enjoy his chapter will find enormously edifying. Nevertheless, Impact can introduce readers to important questions in Roman legal history and can help them find their footing in a complicated literature.
The three chapters in the final Part, ‘Justice for All?’, discuss what might be termed problems of equity in Roman law – namely questions of the universality of Roman justice across social, rather than geographic, boundaries. The first two chapters address gender differentiation in Roman law. E. Köstner uses Roman inheritance law, and particularly the restrictions on female legatees imposed by the lex Voconia, as a lens through which to examine the importance of gender to justice and justice to social life within Roman thought. Next, P. Pavón catalogues some of the many ways in which women were explicitly disadvantaged in Roman law and society – again, the fact that Roman law was not sex-blind will surprise no specialist, but Pavón's article will nevertheless usefully correct some of the most Whiggish approaches to the topic. Finally, M. Carucci uses some remarkable African mosaic depictions of damnatio ad bestias to explore class differentiation in Roman punishment and the spectacular side of Roman justice.
Overall, from my specialist perspective the volume has some curious weaknesses. For the most part (Ando and Köstner being welcome exceptions) the book shies away from the substantial jurisprudential literature that calls our notions of ‘justice’ into question or sociological work casting justice as an embodied social norm rather than a yardstick by which civilisations can be measured. Similarly, for a piece of ancient history the volume is remarkably textual in its sourcing: more chapters deal with Aelius Aristides than with any architectural or spatial evidence at all (a corpus that, to be fair, has been explored recently, thoroughly and well in Spaces of Justice). That said, Impact's greatest impact will not be on specialists. This volume and the others in its series offer readers a bird's-eye view of a complicated field, highlighting promising new voices and introducing giants in the field to readers who may be experiencing their work for the first time. The volume is simply too broad to be deep, but readers who are looking for a foothold in Roman legal historiography will find it here.
