Triple Vision: Ulpian of Tyre on the Duties of the Proconsul

chapter 8 Triple Vision: Ulpian of Tyre on the Duties of the Proconsul

Jill Harries

In a short passage on the conferring of colonia status on provincial cities,1 the early third-century lawyer, Domitius Ulpianus (Ulpian) gave pride of place to his own city, Tyre in Syria:

there is, in Syria Phoenice, the most splendid colonia of the Tyrians, from which I originate, outstanding in her territories, most ancient in the tale of years, powerful in war, and holding most loyally to the treaty struck with the Romans.2

Why the city’s great antiquity should matter is not explained. Ulpian is silent on Tyre’s past as a founder of colonies or its continuing overseas connections with its daughter-cities, such as Lepcis Magna in Tripolitania, the home city of Ulpian’s first imperial patron, Septimius Severus.3 Nor is any concession made to the penchant of the Greek elites for constructing their polis identities on the basis of ancestry and local cultic and historical sites, a process, which both accommodated and challenged Roman supremacy,4 or to the legendary associ- ations of the city with Kadmos, Europa and Dido commemorated on the city’s coinage.5 Instead, pride of place is given to the loyalty of the city to the imperial power, Rome. The sense that the historical geography of Syria was being redrawn by Ulpian as ‘Roman’ is reinforced by the second entry, on Berytus (Beirut), another Phoenician city, which became a colonia of Roman citizens,

1 Ulpian also discusses Severus’ conferring of the ius Italicum, a tax exemption privilege, on favoured cities, which had supported him in the civil war against Pescennius Niger. 2 Digest 50.15.1.pr. est in Syria Phoenice splendidissima Tyriorum colonia, unde mihi origo est, nobilis regionibus, serie saeculorum antiquissima, armipotens, foederis quo cum Romanis per- cussit tenacissima. Cf. reference to Tyrian fellow-citizen at Digest 45.1.70. 3 Millar 1993: 292. On inscriptions, Tyre is titled ‘metropolis’, mother-city. 4 As recorded for ‘old Greece’ by Pausanias. For varying approaches to the relationship of (civic) microidentities to (imperial) macroidentities, see Whitmarsh 2010. 5 Millar 1993: 288–90.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/9789004278288_010 194 harries when veterans were settled there in 15 BCE; by the end of the third century, Berytus would become a recognised centre for the study of Roman law. Ulpian was not alone in reshaping the past in order to reinforce a pres- ent identity but his distancing of himself from his Greek heritage makes him unusual. But the reason that he elected to ‘be Roman’ is straightforward: he was an expert in Roman law and the Latin legal tradition, an expertise, which would deliver him a distinguished career in the imperial administration. Therefore to launch into an extended encomium of his place of origin in a legal treatise would have been inappropriate. However, as this paper will argue, he dif- fered in important respects from Roman lawyers reared at Rome or from Italy, because he retained a ‘provincial’ perspective. Moreover, he was conscious of the need to communicate to a non-Roman readership, and in particular to Greek-speakers, a need only partly explained by his mission to educate new Roman citizens in Roman law in the aftermath of Caracalla’s grant of near- universal Roman citizenship in 212. Ulpian, therefore, is an example of what might be termed ‘triple vision’; he wrote as a Roman lawyer, as a communicator with Greeks and as the native of a city with a ‘provincial’ identity containing both Greek and residual Phoenician elements.

The ‘Honour’ of the Provincials6

To reveal Ulpian ‘the provincial’, we will focus on Ulpian’s account of what was expected of the proconsul on his arrival in his province. The treatise in ten books, De Officio Proconsulis, one of his earliest works (c. 213), carried the authority of experience. Under Severus, Ulpian had probably held the post of secretary of petitions,7 down to perhaps 209. He held no office under Caracalla, but used his ‘leisure’ to good effect, publishing treatises totalling some 270 books explaining Roman law to those Roman citizens newly enfran- chised by the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212. Under Severus Alexander, he returned as Prefect of the Grain Supply, rising quickly to the praetorian pre- fecture in 222. After murdering his two colleagues, Ulpian was himself killed, perhaps in 223 or 224.8 Few aspects of Roman textual culture appear more exclusively ‘Roman’ and ‘Latin’ than Roman law and, at first reading, Ulpian was a true Roman lawyer, versed in the technical language and traditions of his craft. Latin was the

6 cum honori suo provinciales id vindicent. See below, p. 200. 7 Honoré 2002: 18–22. 8 See P. Oxy.2565 for the death of Ulpian before May/June 224.