booklet of abstracts - Oxford University Byzantine Society

Session six9:45 | Saturday 5 March 2011 | Rees Davies RoomChairMichael Stawpertst. John’s CollegeFrom Roman to Byzantine Law:The Change in TestamentaryDeeds from Late Antique EgyptMaria NowakUniversity of WarsawThis paper will study the interaction betweenstatutory law and legal practice in LateAntiquity, and will focus on the externalform of late Roman wills, known thanks tolegal papyri and sources of statutory law,especially the Theodosian and JustinianicCodes. Through the investigation of testamentarydeeds, I intend to illustrate how lawand legal concepts evolved in Late Antiquity,as well as whether these changes were productsof intentional legislative politics or weremore accidental in nature.A comparison between testaments preservedon papyrus and parchment and sourcesof statutory law illustrates both the level of legalknowledge and its application in the provinces.This paper aims to present the origins of solutionsconcerning the external form of wills asdescribed in the codes of Late Antiquity. Byconfronting both documents of legal practiceand the legal sources, I attempt to reconstructrelations between the development of theform of wills at the level of legal practice andthe content of laws. As any single concordancebetween law and practice may be a misleadingcoincidence, one must follow whether changesin law corresponded with changes in practice inorder to determine their relationship.Maria Nowak is a doctoral candidate atthe Department of Roman and Antique Law(University of Warsaw). Her research interestsare papyrology and legal history.The imitatio Constantinopolitanaeurbis as a means of legitimacyand political propaganda in LateAntiquityCarmen Eguiluz MéndezUniversity of Cantabria, SantanderConstantinople, founded by Constantine inthe fourth century on the site of the ancientByzantium, became the nerve centre of theRoman empire, Rome having become amere symbolic capital long before. Foundednot as an antithesis to the Roma senior, butin order to unify the Greek and Romanworld, the πόλις was transformed – thanksto ideological and energetic policies of civicrestoration (anakaínesis or renovatio) – intoa New Rome, successor and advocate of theimperial political unity.A century later, the new Germanicleaders, in an attempt to assimilate theirown political structures with Romanones, adapted or built their capitals basedon the model embodied by Constantinople,the only legitimate heiress of the firstcapital. This is what Cassiodorus definedas imitatio imperii or exemplar unici imperii.Thus Theoderic, in his Ostrogothic reign,and later Leovigild, in the Visigothic reign,tried to turn the cities of Ravenna andToledo, respectively, into urbes regiae,through a program of ideological and urbanimitation, a way also, at the same time,to consolidate and legitimate their power.Carmen Eguiluz Méndez is a doctoralstudent working on the study ofurban evolution of the sedes regiae in Italyand Spain between Late Antiquity and the18 | Between Constantines