The Handbooks De Officio Proconsulis: Authorship
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THE HANDBOOKS DE OFFICIO PROCONSULIS : AUTHORSHIP AND AUDIENCE Rex B. Crews A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classics in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: James B. Rives Sara Mack Mary T. Boatwright Cecil W. Wooten Luca Grillo © 2016 Rex B. Crews ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Rex B. Crews: The Handbooks de officio proconsulis : Authorship and Audience (Under the Direction of James B. Rives) The sixth-century Digest of Justinian preserves individual extracts from four juristic treatises, entitled de officio proconsulis or praesidis and composed during the late second and early third centuries A. D. In the late 19th century the legal scholar Otto Lenel attempted to reassemble these extracts by author and work, with the goal of providing some sense of their original form. The general assumption of many scholars since then has been that these treatises were composed as instructional manuals for the Roman governor, but their original purpose and original audience have been little studied. This dissertation explores the authorship and audience of the works de officio proconsulis/praesidis by comparing the extracts from these legal works with the actual juridical activities of Roman governors as found in literary and epigraphic sources. This comparison reveals many points of correlation between the two and demonstrates that these legal works could have been useful both to the governor and provincial litigants. iii This study concludes that their authors likely conceived of these works more as theoretical legal treaties on the governor’s officium ; however, litigious provincials and the advocates serving them could have found their contents very useful in settling their political scores and legal disputes in the courts of Roman governors, while governors or the jurists on their consilia may have occasionally consulted these handbooks in resolving cases brought before them. iv Optimis Parentibus and to the memory of Dr. Georgia Frothingham, my first Latin teacher and inspiration for my learning about the Classical world. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people who have helped me in the completion of this dissertation. I should like to thank Richard Talbert for first calling my attention to the handbooks de officio proconsulis and for advising me in the early stages of this dissertation. I am very thankful to Cecil Wooten for helping me restart this project after it had been set aside for a number of years. I am most appreciative to James Rives for directing my dissertation. His insightful suggestions and patient reading of many drafts have been invaluable to me in bringing this project to its completion. I am also grateful to all the other members of my committee, Sara Mack, Cecil Wooten, Mary T. Boatwright, and Luca Grillo, for their support, advice and helpful comments along the way. Finally, I thank my partner, Charles MacArthur, for his encouragement and support at every stage of the research and writing process. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: THE WORKS DE OFFICIO PROCONSULIS AND THEIR SOURCES .................................................................................................... 7 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 7 History of Works de officio ............................................................................... 12 Reconstructing the works de officio proconsulis/praesidis ............................. 18 The Authors and their Works .......................................................................... 22 Venuleius Saturninus .................................................................................. 22 Iulius Paulus ................................................................................................ 27 Aemilius Macer ............................................................................................ 32 Marcus Domitius Ulpianus ......................................................................... 38 Synoptic Overview of Ulpian's de officio proconsulis ................................. 44 Sources for Ulpian’s de officio proconsulis ...................................................... 62 Summation ....................................................................................................... 73 CHAPTER 2: THE JURIDICAL ACTIVITIES OF ROMAN GOVERNORS AND LITIGANTS IN PLINY AND APULEIUS .......................... 75 Pliny: Governor and Épistolier ........................................................................ 76 The Nature and Context of the Letter Collection ........................................... 77 The Nature and Purpose of Pliny’s Appointment ........................................... 83 The Legal System in Bithynia-Pontus ............................................................ 87 Pliny as Iudex : Five Case Studies ................................................................... 91 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 110 vii The Cognitio Extra Ordinem Procedure from a Different Perspective ..................................................................................................... 116 Similarities between Apuleius’ Apology and the Case Studies from Pliny ......................................................................................... 125 CHAPTER 3: THE PURPOSE, UTILITY AND AUDIENCE FOR THE HANDBOOKS DE OFFICIO PROCONSULIS/PRAESIDIS ..................... 134 Juristic Opinions and Legal Disputes: Points of Overlap ........................... 135 From Disputes to Opinions (and Back Again) .............................................. 146 Evidence for Use of the Handbooks ............................................................... 155 Legal Professionals and their Use of the Handbooks ................................... 156 Concluding Thoughts ..................................................................................... 160 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 162 APPENDIX A: LATIN TEXT OF THE HANDBOOKS WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION ........................................................................... 164 APPENDIX B: TABLE OF RESCRIPTA IN ULPIAN’S DE OFFICIO PROCONSULIS ............................................................................ 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 167 viii INTRODUCTION The Digest of Justinian represents the codification of Roman law extracted from the works of Roman jurists composed some three to five hundred years earlier. Since the original juristic treatises were suppressed after the publication of the Digest in A. D. 533, almost nothing of these survives beyond the individual extracts accompanied by author, title and book number, as preserved in the Digest . Consequently, many questions arise regarding these original works. What do we know about the authors? What was their intention in composing their treatises? Who was their audience? How were they meant to be used, and how in practice were they actually used? For many years these questions received scant attention, because the texts preserved in the Digest were by and large the preserve of specialists in Roman law. For such scholars, questions of abstract legal theory were of more interest than practical matters of authorship or readership. Even when they turned their attention to issues concerning the original form of the juristic treatises, they tended to focus on their place in the development of legal theory rather than their practical application. In recent decades, however, other scholars have made increasing use of these works, particularly as an important source for social history: one can think of John Crook’s pioneering work Law and Life of Rome (1967), or Jane Gardner’s Women in Roman Law and Society 1 (1986), or more recently Ari Bryen’s Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (2013). It is now relatively commonplace for these texts to be quoted in or to serve as primary sources for general Roman histories. For scholars interested in using juristic texts as a source for social history, the intentions behind and, even more importantly, the actual use of the original treatises become crucial issues. It is now clear that understanding the nature, purpose and audience of these texts in their original form as well as how they may actually have been used helps us elucidate Roman law and Roman society alike. The coming of age of this broader approach to legal texts is clearly in evidence in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society , due to be published in August 2016. In the context of this growing scrutiny of Roman legal texts, one particular group of them deserves individualized attention: the pronouncements collected under the titles de officio proconsulis and de officio praesidis . There are excerpts from four such treatises cited in the Digest . A few of these excerpts are grouped under the rubrics De officio proconsulis et legati (1.16) and De officio praesidis (1.18), but the majority are scattered here and there throughout the fifty books. These texts