Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

introduction: law in the late roman empire 239
competence at the expense of the local officials nearer to the citizens.
Jurisdiction over weighty matters, as for example capital punishment or the
imposition of special levies, was transferred to the centre or made dependent
on lodging a report and obtaining central assent. Even such an important
official as the city prefect tended to prefer to report to the centre rather
than decide matters himself. 2
The substantive law of the principate was developed – with, for
example, more sensitive differentiation in relation to succession on intestacy
– and was adapted to changed circumstances. The most important
change was the transformation of the dominant ideology, since the adoption
of Christianity and imperial responsibility for enforcing orthodoxy
produced a substantial body of legislation. Changes to the tax system under
Diocletian and Constantine generated a huge mass of laws intended to
tighten its efficiency and ensure that the state’s increasing financial needs
were promptly satisfied by all subjects. To ensure regularity of supplies,
various posts and professions were peremptorily made subject to legal
burdens on a hereditary basis. In particular, membership of town councils,
which had become less attractive, relatively, in comparison to service in the
imperial bureaucracy, and perhaps also absolutely, because of the demands
of tax collection, had to be defended by a sequence of laws. 3
Tenant farmers were another area of particular legislative concern. In
the course of the fourth century they were gradually turned from a free
smallholder into a serf with scarcely more rights than a slave, though with
regional exceptions and differences, so that landowners’ objectives were
not universally achieved. There was also an important change in family law.
The hitherto dominant rule had been that children followed the status of
their mother if for any reason their parents’ union did not amount to a fully
valid marriage. Step by step this regula iuris gentium was displaced by the principle
that such children must follow the parent with the lower status. 4 Penal
statutes with grisly punishments aimed at life and limb multiplied for
people of all ranks, 5 and free status no longer gave immunity from torture.
For embezzlement in the public sphere, money penalties at hitherto
unimaginable levels were introduced. However, corruption was to an
extent legalized, in that payments for procuring position or office or securing
performance of an official act, which had become customary, were generalized
and had their amounts fixed. 6 There was also legislation which
turned with new emphasis to the task of providing for public welfare. 7
The texts give the impression that these laws reached out to their
victims like the tentacles of an octopus, but the reality was different. The
2 E.g. Symmachus, Relat.; Liebs (1983) 220–3; Dazert (1986) 157f.
3 C.Th. xii; cf. Liebs (1986) 276f. 4 Voss (1985). 5 Liebs (1985).
6 Merkel (1888); Veyne (1981); Noethlichs (1981); MacMullen (1988).
7 Vogt (1945) 141–2; Biondi (1952–4).
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