Ill ROME AND THE PROVINCES
color=black face="Times New Roman">In the two and a half centuries of the classical period of Roman law the boundaries of the empire expanded.
It covered a vast area, from Asia to Britain. Did the same law apply across this expanse, or was Roman law the law of Rome alone?This is a difficult question, and a categorical answer to it would be ill- advised. Indeed, even to mention it is perhaps incautious. There must have been local and regional differences in the extent of Romanization. But the following points suggest that, in some areas at least, there were substantial similarities between Roman and provincial practice.
Governors of provinces were responsible for the administration of justice in their provinces, just as the praetors were in Rome. In just the same way they issued edicts. From the republic we have reasonable information about this, since one of Cicero's charges in his speeches against Verres is that he abused his position as governor by tampering with his edict (Cic., ii in Verrem 1.119—21). That charge itself, while likely to be rhetorically exaggerated, does perhaps hint at an expectation that the provincial edict would remain fairly stable. Indeed, the administration of justice more or less requires that. In the second century AD Gaius wrote a commentary on the provincial edict, and it seems likely therefore that its text had been settled by then, just as had that of the urban edict about ad 125. It seems probable that the governor's edict in essentials mirrored the edict promulgated in Rome by the praetor.
It remains a matter of dispute whether the formulary system of Roman civil procedure (discussed in chapter 6) was applied throughout the provinces or was essentially confined to those classified as public provinces.
The present concern, however, is with the question of Romanization, and it can be said with confidence that Roman legal practices were widely diffused through the provinces. Formulae which are faithful to the practice attested by juristic writings for Rome have been found in the Babatha archive in the province of Arabia, and in Transylvania, as well as in Spain and in the south of Italy (Wolff 1980; Kaser 1996: 163—71).The Flavian municipal laws, of which substantial remnants survive for various Spanish municipalities, make very frequent reference to Roman practice, and indicate that the same procedures are to be followed in the municipality as in Rome. It is probable, however, that these represent an extreme of Romanization, so to treat them as representative of the rest of the empire would be unwise.
The extent of Romanization in these laws is particularly clear in the recently discovered lex Irnitana, a municipal statute originally set out on ten bronze tablets, from a town in Spain so small that it had never previously been heard of. Several chapters contain references to Roman practices for such things as which cases should be heard by single judges and which by several judges (recuperatores), and what time limits applied for hearing cases and for adjourning them (lex Irn. chs. K= 49, 89, 91).
The most striking chapter of all is chapter 93, which provides ‘For matters for which it is not expressly written or provided in this statute what law the citizens of the municipality of Irni should use among themselves, for all those matters let them use the civil law which Roman citizens use and shall use among themselves...'.
This is very remarkable. The provisions of Roman law were not merely displayed, laboriously engraved in bronze, but intended to be applied. The same picture is confirmed by two more chapters of the lex Irnitana: the first is concerned with setting the limits on the jurisdiction exercisable by the local magistrates at Irni and contains a long list of matters reserved to the higher authority of the provincial governor.
What is interesting here is that for a wide range of legal actions it was actually the provincial governor who had jurisdiction: this will have served to reinforce the consistency with which Roman law was applied even in outlying parts of the empire. It is likely that the same would apply to outlying parts of Italy, except that there the higher jurisdiction would be that of the praetor (lex Irn. ch. 84).The second of these chapters provides that the local magistrates are to display and to exercise their jurisdiction in accordance with the ‘interdiets, edicts, formulae, promises (sponsiones and stipulationes), securities (satis dationes), defences, and prescriptions' set out in the edict of the provincial governor (lex Irn. ch. 85). Accordingly, even where the local jurisdiction was itself competent for the matter at issue, the local statute required that the citizens and residents of Irni should make use of Roman law as promulgated in the Roman governor's edict.
It cannot be said that the entire Roman empire was run on the footing of Spanish municipalities such as Irni, so it would not be legitimate to conclude that Romanization of this degree was universal. None the less, the formulae from the Babatha archive show that even in Arabia Roman law was being applied: in ad 124—5 Babatha, who was apparently not a Roman citizen, sued in the court of the Roman governor at Petra, where Roman law was applied. But this seems to have been a voluntary decision on her part; apparently the Jewish population made use of foreign laws and practices as well as their own. In short, within the empire there were local variations, places such as Arabia and Egypt where ‘indigenous' legal orders survived and were happily tolerated by the Roman administration (Norr 1998: 98; Cotton 1993: 101, 107; Modrzejewski 1970: 317-47; Kaser 1996: 167-8).
The evidence therefore supports a remarkable penetration of Roman legal culture wide throughout the empire. The grant of citizenship to virtually the whole population of the empire in ad 212 will have consolidated this process. But the role of Roman law in the provinces was not uniform, and our picture of it necessarily remains an impressionistic one.