The study of Roman government is bedeviled by methodological difficulties; most intractable among these are the rules of evidence. We possess no synoptic diagram of the Roman bureaucracy, no handbook of the empire’s taxes. Even for the first two centuries of the common era, the period with which this chapter is centrally concerned, the significance of such evidence as we do possess is heatedly debated (Eck 1999). I cite two disparate examples: we know that governors of provinces issued edicts setting forth the principles and regulations of their administrations - cicero’s for Cilicia in 51-50 bce is perhaps the best attested, but merely through allusions in his letters (Pliny Ep. 10.96.7 and Ulpian D. 1.16.4.4-5 on publication of edicts; see also Marshall 1964; Galsterer 1986: 16-17). In the mid-second century ce the lawyer Gaius wrote a commentary on the ‘‘Provincial Edict’’ in 32 books, ofwhich some 335 fragments survive (Lenel 1889: 1: 189-237). We simply do not know whether by his day some emperor had ordered the production and use of a standard edict for all provinces. The absence of later commentaries by the better-preserved Severan jurists is not decisive: caracalla’s grant of citizenship to all freeborn residents of the empire in 212 CE will have dramatically altered the legal landscape: any and all earlier ‘‘provincial edicts’’ will have had to be entirely rewritten. (Hence Ulpian, writing after Caracalla’s edict, produced ten books ‘‘On the Duties of a Proconsul’’ and one ‘‘On the Duties of Imperial Administrators of Cities’’ [Lenel 1889: 2: 958-9 and 966-91], and none, so far as we know, on the classic topic of provincial edicts, namely, the governance of non-citizens.)
Again, many bureaucratic protocols and administrative procedures of Roman government were long best, and sometimes exclusively, attested on Egyptian papyri: these include the registration of births and deaths (birth registrations: Ando 2000: 355-6; death registrations: Virlouvet 1997), the recording of real estate transactions (A. E. Hanson 1994; Worrle 1975), systems of taxation (Rathbone 1993), and the mechanics of judicial hearings (Haensch 1992, 1997). There was a time when scholars dogmatically insisted that Roman Egypt was unique and therefore excluded its evidence from attempts to reconstruct practice elsewhere. Epigraphic and papyro-logical discoveries of the last two decades have dramatically shifted consensus on this question (Feissel and Gascou 1995: 66; Lewis 1995: 138-49, 298-305; Eck 1999: 13-14). A major cause of this problem is the systematically asymmetrical nature of our evidence: from Egypt survive many documents originating with the imperial government, testifying to its interest and procedures; from almost every other region of the empire survive only texts that private individuals or local collectivites saw fit to inscribe on stone or bronze, and their commitment to reproducing the protocols and language of official texts varied widely (Ando 2000: 80-90; and Gagos/Potter, this volume). One important recent trend, spurred in part by the discovery and publication of the wooden writing tablets from Vindolanda near Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, has been an increasing awareness of the range of media on which the Roman government published and stored information. If we cannot now recover them and their contents, we can at least remain cognizant of their utility and extent (Eck 1998; Ando 2000: 97, 102-3,110-11, 356-7; Salway2000: 120-3; E. Meyer 2004).
World History
