Spaces of Roman Constitutionalism 26-28 September 2019 Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition (SpaceLaw) University of Helsinki Tieteiden talo (House of Science and Letters) Kirkkokatu 6, 00170 Helsinki Márlio Aguiar (University of São Paulo): Iurisdictio, ius dicere and ius dicentis officium in Roman legal tradition between the Republic and the Principate The word iurisdictio can be described as a basic historical concept (Geschichtliche Grundbegriff) in Roman legal and political history. It is at the same time a semantic unit that aims to explain a social phenomenon as a cognoscitive scientia or ars, and a normative concept which aims to act in social reality, concerned with the exercise of ius dicere to order the society. With the transformation and growth from the Republic to the Empire, not only the ius ciuile was marked with many changes, but 1 also the ius publicum (concerning the res publica, the princeps, the magistrates and the Roman officials) – and the iurisdictio was related with both private and public dimensions. After the lex Aebucia and the lex Plaetoria, from the mid and Late Republic until the Severan age, the Romans effectively used this concept within their own legal and cultural tradition of continuous modification of past concepts. The Romans later forged the nominalized form of the word that expressed the characteristics, symbols and acts of the “ius dicere”: praetors, aediles, the princeps, prases provinciarum, praefecti (and many of their legati) were all invested with some kind of iurisdictio, the ius dicentis officium (Ulp. D.2.1.1). The iurisdictio also played a large role in Roman legal history by its function in Roman civil procedure as the main function of the iudex appointed by the magistrate in the in iure stage for the trial in the stage apud iudicem. The iurisdictio is linked since its origins with the administration of Justice, simultaneously with the procedural-institutional aspects (the Courts, the quaestiones etc.) and substantial aspects of the ius edicendi. The iurisdictio was also connected with key-terms of the Roman public realm and its political culture, specially imperium, potestas and auctoritas. The relevance (and the tension) of such terms remained in the post-Classical and medieval understanding of iurisdictio as can be seen in the various comments on Digest 2.1.1 and D.1.21.1 in authors like Bartolus. For our purposes, the iurisdictio can be seen as the nodal point of the institutional and the legal history of Rome; it is an evidence of the immense laboratory of experiments of republican and imperial administrative and political practices. In brief, the iurisdictio is a way to understand how they thought their own politics, the exercise of governance and the “language” capable of expressing their legal experience. Tuuli Ahlholm (University of Oxford): Public figures? The display of numerical state information and the values of Roman Republicanism Producing and processing numerical data was an inherent part of Roman Republican administration, in the form of census records, tax revenues, state expenses, war booties, military logistics, election results, and geographical and architectural measurements. Public display and dissemination of such figures appears imperative to any political system that relies on the will of the people (cf. Cuomo, 2011). Any people that is entrusted with decision power, as was the case with the Republican populus, requires precise and objective state numbers to make informed decisions; and, they also satisfy the need for administrative accountability and transparency. Accordingly, we find that the Roman Republic had multiple fora to display such figures in public spaces, from the regular tabulae to both publicly and privately funded monuments. However, when we examine Republican history and what sort of numbers were recorded in monuments, we find that in different points of Republican history the public display of numerical data was heavily controlled by the elite, often also contested and subject to change. The status of public space as a forum of trustworthy political information was gravely compromised when many key state records could, in fact, be confined only to private spaces, and elites claimed the right to display triumphantly numbers of e.g. military campaigns in private monuments. How heavily were numbers that were allowed to enter the public sphere filtered and manipulated? What sort of numbers were carved in public monuments for all eternity, and which were only transiently available before disappearing to various public and private archives whereupon free and meaningful consultation was, as a rule, impossible? The current paper 1) reconstructs where, what kind of, and by whose agency numerical information relating to state matters was exhibited publicly in ancient Rome; 2) how public space was 2 accordingly used to display, often only superficially, values of democratic accountability and participation; and 3) what implications these aspects had on the balance of power between the populus and the elite in this ancient state that we call a republic. Joel Allen (City University of New York): Public Space at Nighttime in the Roman Republic On a morning in 121 BCE, dawn in the city of Rome shed light on the product of a nighttime escapade. According to Plutarch (Gaius Gracchus 16.6), onto the Temple of Concordia had been painted a slogan that reproached the consul, Lucius Opimius, who had commandeered the space by means of a reconstruction. The Gracchan faction, already oppressed by Opimius since the death of their champion, by means of nocturnal graffiti now challenged his claim to “their” temple, which had tokenized popular authority for centuries (Morstein-Marx 2004). The Gracchans thus achieved a declaration: the city one saw in the light of day was not the only city. A regime of the night should loom in any imagination, whereby different populations practiced different rites and were governed by different rules, ignored at one’s peril. This paper reads this and other episodes involving public space after dark against expectations of nighttime as revealed in Roman literary sources. On the one hand, evening hours were a moment of anxiety owing to fear of the unknown, be it human or supernatural, a sentiment that is clear among writers of the late Republic (Mueller 2004, on Livy) and early Principate (Spaeth 2010, on Ovid, among others). Roman political thought accordingly considered the evening city a different place from that of the day. In the Twelve Tables (VIII), the very existence of due process—the life-blood of any civil society—hinged on whether a crime were committed in darkness: during waking hours personal theft and political assemblage, no matter how contentious, had to be treated by the book; at night, at least with thieves, it was sauve qui peut. The state of light could influence the propriety of senate meetings (Ramsey 2008). On the other hand, as James Ker has shown (2004), in certain contexts nighttime labor was ennobled, precisely, according to Quintilian (10.3.22-27), because it was shielded from public review and gave the practitioner freedom to operate without shame or laughter. The nocturnal community could be seen as a productive one. Unruh (2015) reads a passage in Seneca’s Thyestes as a comment on the Domus Aurea’s encroachment onto public space, bringing with it a more gruesome form of night. As with historians of other pre- and early-modern societies (Koslofsky 2011, Baldwin 2012), the study of nighttime in Rome reveals nuances of social relations, political movements, and cultural stereotypes. Clifford Ando (University of Chicago): The Perils of Republican Magistracy: Elite Competition in Space and Time It was a notable feature of Roman republican politics that competition among the elite for prestige and office took place to a very large degree outside of Rome. In the language of Sallust, which was echoed by Augustine and affirmed by Machiavelli, the virtue of the elite was expressed in a desire to dominate, and the project of empire issued from a compromise whereby that desire to dominate was directed not at the masses in Rome but outwards, to enemies further and further afield. By the early second century BCE, the diversity and size of the empire triggered fundamental changes in the structures of politics and the nature of elite competition. The effects of this are visible in the politicization of controls on magistrates in two arenas, senate and assembly. These controls were often expressed in terms of geographic constraints on magisterial action, which amounted to an incipient project of mapping and territorializing empire. 3 Alberto Barrón Ruiz de la Cuesta (Universidad de Cantabria): Among priests and magistrates: towards the function of the seviri Augustales The aim of this contribution is to analyse the discussed function of the Augustality, following the precedent studies and the preserved sources of the seviratus Augustalis, which are mainly epigraphic. The uncertain rank and nature of this urban and semi-official institution, that was mainly hold by freedmen, has fostered the debate about its primary occupation and the responsibilities that it implied. While some aspects of the seviratus Augustalis are typical of a priesthood, other features can be also related with a collegiate magistracy, or even with the professional collegia. Indeed, the name of this particular organisation is parallel to those ones of many priesthoods, as some of its symbols