The mere thought of studying archaic Roman law has irritated or alarmed many past scholars, but in Bell and du Plessis’ edited volume (whose origins lie in a 2017 Edinburgh workshop), a very welcome attempt is made to explore from an interdisciplinary perspective ‘the dawn of Roman Law’, as the introductory essay puts it. For, as the editors note, ‘origins matter’ (1).
The volume contains ten chapters, divided into three sections. Part I, ‘The materiality of Roman law: new archaeological discoveries’, sets early Roman law into the Italic context, and addresses the structures within which laws developed. Its three chapters focus on the importance of archaeological and epigraphic material in tracing the development of archaic law. James Clackson, in ‘Roman law in its Italic context’, highlights not so much the ‘Italic context’ for Roman law, but rather how the ‘pervasive influence of Greek law on the laws of ancient Italy’ (21) helped create something ‘new and different’ (9). The chapter by P. Gregory Warden and Adriano Maggiani, ‘Authority and display in sixth-century Etruria: the Vicchio stele’, looks at an archaic sacred law and the northern Etruscan sanctuary of Poggio Cola in which it was found. The stele, one of the longest surviving inscriptions in Etruscan, prompts consideration of elite power, and of the dissemination of sacred and secular knowledge within this society. In the final chapter of Part I, Matthew C. Naglak and Nicola Terrenato discuss ‘Central Italian elite groups as aristocratic houses in the ninth to sixth centuries BCE’. The chapter is inspired by one of Rome's great rivals in archaic Latium, Gabii, a city whose archaeology the authors know well. Employing the Lévi-Straussian ‘House society’ ethnographic model, they argue that archaic laws arose in response to social and political changes symbolised by the development of the kinds of elite housing they have excavated at Gabii in recent years.
Naglak and Terrenato maintain that recent archaeological discoveries such as theirs offer an alternative to the ‘endless dissection’ of ancient literary sources which has led to debates being ‘stuck in a rut’ (26). But the literary sources are profitably employed in Part II of the volume, which moves on to the question of ‘Constructing early Roman law: sources and methods’. Here the focus is on the scattered threads of early law to be found in later Roman literary narratives, with the focus on the so-called leges regiae and (inevitably, despite the title of the volume) the Twelve Tables.
Carlos Felipe Amunátegui Perelló, in ‘The Twelve Tables and the leges regiae: a problem of validity’, debates the relationship between the laws of the kings, the Twelve Tables and Greek law, a relationship also addressed in other contributions to this volume, notably Clackson's. Marco Rocco, ‘The leges regiae in Livy: narratological and stylistic strategies’, sets out the background to the debate on the nature of the regal laws, and analyses the ways in which Livy makes use of them, for example to characterise individual archaic kings as exemplars, positive or negative, within the context of the new Augustan monarchy. The article by Rossella Laurendi, ‘The leges regiae through tradition, historicity and invention’, is tightly focused on a single ‘law of Numa’, concerned with religious scruples in connection with paelices (concubines), which she uses to argue for the authentic nature of elements of the leges regiae. Christopher Smith's measured and carefully argued chapter, ‘The laws of the kings — a view from a distance’, takes an holistic approach which emphasises the importance of contextualising these laws within the increasingly urbanised society that produced them, while Jeremy Armstrong in ‘Beyond the pomerium: expansion and legislative authority in archaic Rome’ assesses the place of law in relations between early Rome and the states with which it interacted, aggressively or otherwise.
The two chapters in Part III, ‘Roman law in historiography and theory’, stand somewhat apart from the rest of the volume, examining early modern theoretical treatments of early Roman law. Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi, in ‘Niebuhr and Bachofen: new forms of evidence on Roman history’, discusses the impact on the study of Roman law of these two giants of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal and historical scholarship, an impact still felt, while Alain Pottage, in ‘Finding Melanesia in ancient Rome’, discusses Roman concepts of nexum (‘debt-bondage’) in the context of Marcel Mauss's anthropological theories on reciprocity.
The contributions to this tidily produced volume share themes such as the connection between law, writing and literacy, and the distinctions, such as they are, between sacred and secular law. The work boasts some very distinguished contributors. Some are authorities on Roman law; du Plessis in particular has a track record of producing approachable works in this field. Though not all other contributors are legal specialists by any means, their combined expertise on early Rome and its environs brings much that is fresh to the debate.
