UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Law, Land, and Territories: The Roman Diaspora and the Making of Provincial Administration Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6fd691jn Author Eberle, Lisa Pilar Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Law, Land, and Territories: The Roman Diaspora and the Making of Provincial Administration By Lisa Pilar Eberle A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Emily Mackil, Chair Professor Carlos Noreña Professor Nikolaos Papazarkadas Professor Neil Fligstein Fall 2014 © 2014 Lisa Pilar Eberle Abstract Law, Land, and Territories: The Roman Diaspora and the Making of Provincial Administration by Lisa Pilar Eberle Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology University of California, Berkeley Professor Emily Mackil, Chair This dissertation examines the relationship between the institutions of Roman provincialadministration and the economy of the Roman imperial diaspora in the Eastern Mediterranean in the second and first centuries BC. Focusing on the landed estates that many members of the imperial diaspora acquired in the territories of Greek cities, I argue that contestation over the allocation of resources in the provinces among Roman governing classes, the members of the imperial diaspora, and the elites of Greek cities decisively shaped the contours of what we would late recognize as the institutions of provincial administration. Setting the Roman Empire within a new comparative framework, Chapter One suggests that ancient cities around the Mediterranean, including Rome, often used their imperial power to help their own citizens infringe upon the exclusionary property regimes of other cities, which insisted that—unless they decided otherwise—only their own citizens could acquire this land. Chapter Two combines semantic history with archaeological case-studies to argue that Roman ownership of agricultural resources in the territories of provincial cities was wide- spread and in fact often underpinned the movement of products for which the members of the diaspora are more commonly known. Chapter Three uses epigraphic documentation and Cicero’s writings to examine how provincial governors responded to the economic concerns that Romans brought before them, maintaining that law became the most prominent response because it was able to perform a separation between the empire as state and the potentially problematic actions by members of the diaspora, while at the same time not abandoning these Romans’ concerns. Chapter Four investigates the contestation over the terms on which members of the diaspora were able to acquire land in Greek cities and vindicates the contributions that Roman jurists and the elites of Greek cities made to the institutional architecture of provincial administration and the political economy it enshrined. 1 For my parents i TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 1. Land and the Statecraft of Civic Empires 12 2. Land in the Economy of the Roman Diaspora in the Greek East 42 3. The Roman Diaspora and the Origins of Law in Roman Provincial Administration 76 4. Jurists, Greek Elites, and Governors as Architects of Empire 116 Conclusion 158 Bibliography 156 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While writing this dissertation I have incurred important debts; it is a great pleasure to acknowledge them here. I would like to thank my supervisor Emily Mackil, who from the very first time that I walked into her office as a graduate student has encouraged and fostered the ideas that I was beginning to articulate, persistently pushing me to express them more clearly. Thanks are due to her for much more than the perspicacious supervision of this dissertation. Second, the probing questions of Carlos Noreña were instrumental in helping me think through the relationship between my own approaches and arguments and those of other scholars in the field. Discussions with Nikolaos Papazarkadas always provided an invaluable reminder of just how much we can learn from the little evidence that survives from the ancient world. After visits to Neil Fligstein’s office I was always able to imagine a bit more concretely just what parts of my argument academics outside of Classics might find interesting. I would like to express my deep gratitude to these four members of my dissertation committee for their abiding trust and belief that my research would eventually yield a fully-fledged dissertation. The intellectual origin of the project lies in a seminar on the rule of law in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century that Huricihan Islamoğlu taught at Berkeley in the spring of 2010. The readings and discussions in this seminar were my entry point into thinking about the politics of law and property, and they continue to shape my thinking to this day. Nicholas Purcell’s Sather Lectures two years later were instrumental in helping me understand how the insights I had gained from reading about law and property in the modern period might translate into a meaningful project concerning the Graeco-Roman past. It has been a great privilege to have been able to learn from both these admirable scholars. I have presented parts of my argument in papers delivered at the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, the Legal History Workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, the research colloquium of the International Max Planck Research School for Comparative Legal History in Frankfurt (a. M.), and a conference at the University of Nottingham. I am grateful for the comments, suggestions, and criticisms I received from audiences on all of these occasions. I owe deep and enduring gratitude to all these people. All mistakes that remain are my own. Financial support from a variety of institutions has made the completion of this dissertation possible. Thanks are due to my home department, the Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, for giving me a stipend for the semester after I had finished my qualifying exams, which allowed me to begin acquainting myself with primary material in the congenial surroundings of the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich. Funding from the University of California, Berkeley and from the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History have supported most of the writing and research. In between, a month-long stipend at the École française d’Athènes gave me access to the iii school’s wonderful research collection. In the final stages the resources of St. John’s College, Oxford have proven invaluable. While writing this dissertation, I have lived in many places; Berkeley, Frankfurt (a. M.), Athens, Oxford, and Berlin have been the main stations along my journey. Thanks are due to the many people who have made and continue to make each of these places feel like home to me. The friendship of Derin McLeod, Eric Driscoll, and Zachary Manfredi has always added much pleasure and insightful conversations to my returns to the Bay Area. As “Team Lisa” they have also read and commented on the English and the ideas of innumerable drafts of my applications, abstracts, and chapters. I hope to one day be able to repay them. In Frankfurt, Claudia Baumann, Philipp Höhn, Wibke Schmidt, and my two office mates, Eva-Maria Kuhn and Julia Vinson, were wonderful interlocutors on legal history, German politics, and the little problems of academic life. My conversations with Enora LeQuéré and Pavlos Karvonis about the ancient world and austerity-ridden Greece that began in Athens continue to this day. In Oxford, lunch and tea with the extraordinarily welcoming community of Early Career Fellows at St. John’s was a crucial daily ritual that accompanied the last stages of completing this dissertation. Joanna Kusiak has been a source of inspiration, support, and learning ever since we lived together in Berlin. Her lasting friendship throughout this journey, maintained by many kitchen and skype conversations, has made my experience of it immeasurably richer. My parents in Austria have continuously followed the emotional ups and downs of this project from afar—a circumstance that cannot have made it easier—and always offered sympathy, comfort, and encouragement. It is in gratitude for this and for their lifelong belief in me that I dedicate this dissertation to them. iv INTRODUCTION In 88 BC thousands of Romans and Italians died in mainland Greece and Western Asia Minor. They were killed at the order of Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, as part of his attempt to expel Roman power from these regions. But these Romans and Italians were not soldiers; they were ordinary citizens. Ancient authors disagree about the precise numbers of those killed: 20.000 in Greece and 80.000 or 150.000 in Asia Minor.1 These numbers, impressive though they are, are part of a Roman rhetoric of horror, rather than an indication of solid statistics. But it is clear that the presence of Romans and Italians in the Greek cities in the Eastern Mediterranean in the early first century BC was not a random and incidental occurrence. Mithridates wrote a letter to all his officials in the Greek cities in Asia, cities that had just defected from Rome, and ordered them to kill the Romans and Italians resident