CONCLUSION
In this section an attempt has been made to determine whether there were high-level and low-level courts under the Empire, and whether the courts of the Emperor and Senate fitted the first category and the jury-courts and the courts of the prefect and governors the second.
There are many gaps in our evidence, and such evidence as we have is chiefly concerned with high-status offenders and capital offences. But as far as we can tell, there was no sharp dichotomy between these two sets of courts. Trials of equestrians or senators before jury-courts on charges of a nonpolitical nature were not unheard of in the Julio-Claudian age at least (the later history of those courts is lost to us); the urban prefect dealt with litigants of status or influence with some degree of regularity; and provincial governors, although they lost final judgement over high-status provincials in capital cases towards the end of our period, retained non-capital jurisdiction over them. Again, neither the Senate nor the Emperor’s court was closed to men of little status or influence. We can say only that the average defendant before a jury-court (for as long as the jury-courts were active) and before the court of the urban prefect was of humble station, and that senators and equestrians accused of serious crimes went normally but not exclusively before the Senate or the Emperor. Provincial aristocrats were less well off because of their physical separation from Rome. The concession they were granted came late, in the late Antonine or early Severan period, and was relevant only in the most serious criminal cases. But if as a group they were denied regular access to the Emperor’s court, it was always open to enterprising and affluent individuals from their ranks to bypass the governor and launch prosecutions or defend suits before the Emperor or a delegate.This section also aimed at investigating the treatment given to defendants of different status in the various courts. It was found that low-status defendants were brought before the Senate or Emperor more often for punishment than for trial, and that if 8261947 H
they were subjected to a relatively full examination and found guilty, they received harsher penalties than high-status defendants on the same charges.
Moreover, low-status plaintiffs had small chance of success if their opponents were of higher status (as in these courts they commonly were). The urban prefect, it was suggested, would not have taken up the same stance towards high-status and low-status defendants. Alleged forgers of wills from the upper stratum of society would not have been deprived of status and property without a prior investigation of some thoroughness. But the numerous crimes of theft and violence committed by those without property against the propertied would have been dealt with by the prefect in more summary fashion. In general it can be said that judges and juries were suspicious of, if not resentful towards, low-status plaintiffs who attacked their ‘betters’ in court, and were prepared to believe the worst of low-status defendants, while the pleas of high-status plaintiffs or defendants, who in any case were likely to be more coherent and better-versed in the law, were given more credence. Further, as the next section shows in some detail, all courts which were not bound by an inflexible penalty system, that is, all which tried cases extra ordinem, applied more degrading and more severe penalties to condemned men of low status and power than to those better placed in the stratification system.
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