The processes through which Rome acquired and settled territory generated provinces that resembled complex mosaics: Roman commanders routinely rewarded allied communities with legal privileges, most notably the freedom to use their own laws and impose their own taxes and, very exceptionally, freedom from Roman taxation (see, e. g., RS 19, esp. ll. 31-6; on local rights of taxation see Millar 1977: 425-8; on the hierarchy of cities in general see J. Reynolds 1988: 23-5, and Millar 1999b). The formula of a province will, therefore, have recorded the fact that some cities were ‘‘exempt from the schedule of the province’’ (J. Reynolds 1982, no. 141. 3 and no. 15 l. 12-14; cf. Robert and Robert 1989, Menippos col. 1, ll. 39-40, and RS 19, ll. 1830). Privileged communities subsequently devoted enormous effort to retaining their status, sending embassies to each new emperor seeking to confirm privileges granted long ago: early in the third century ce, the Thudedenses, the inhabitants of what the Romans considered a proto-urban settlement near Tipasa in Mauretania, asked Caracalla to confirm the territorial boundaries and tax-immunity granted them by Juba II and confirmed by Augustus two centuries before (Aii 1985, 972; see also Plin. Nat. 5.25; on embassies from cities to the imperial court see Millar 1977: 394447; on the storage and display ofthe documents these embassies generated see Ando 2000: 90-6).
The citation of treaties and imperial letters constituted one important check on innovation in imperial administration: having issued official documents, Rome then had to adhere to their stipulations (Ando 2000: 36-40, 351-82). Another African text, the Tabula Banasitana, reproduces a letter from an imperial freedman in the reign of Commodus, certifying through the quotation of documentary evidence the possession of Roman citizenship by one Julianus of the Zagrenses and his immediate family. The freedman copied the document from, and checked it against, ‘‘the record of those granted citizenship by the divine Augustus and Tiberius Caesar Augustus and Gaius Caesar and the divine Claudius and Nero and Galba and the divine Augusti Vespasian and Titus and Domitian Caesar and the divine Augusti Nerva and Trajan Parthicus and Trajan Hadrian and Hadrian Antoninus Pius and Verus....’’ (lAM 94). The enormous respect for bureaucratic rationality evinced in the Tabula Banasitana is perhaps most remarkably attested in a Neronian law on the customs of Asia, issued in 62 ce and discovered at Ephesus: the law, consisting of more than 155 long lines, summarizes the regulations for Asian customs established in an initial law of 122 BCE; it then cites all subsequent modifications to that law, from 72,17,12, and 2 bce, as well as those passed in 5, 8, 37, and 62 ce (SEG 39 no. 1180, on which see Nicolet 2000: 335-84).
At the same time, powerful forces promoted a gradual coalescence in administration, in matters of both procedure and substance. First, Roman officials could not but actualize their respect for mos regionis, ‘‘local custom,’’ in ways informed by deep-seated habits of mind (cf. Ulpian D. 25.4.1.15). In one famous case, the city of Contrebia in Spain sought the aid of C. Valerius Flaccus to settle a dispute between two communities in its territory. Flaccus responded by providing a legal framework through which Contrebia could settle the matter itself: although he urged the use of Celtiberian law, Flaccus understood the case to concern ager publicus and ager privatus, communal and private land, and suggested that the decision be reached through the fictio, the legal fiction, that the rules of one community applied to both. In other words, Flaccus urged Contrebia and its communities to accommodate their laws to the categories and modes of argument of Roman law (Galsterer 1986: 22; Ando 2000: 342). The law of the municipality of Irni, in Spain, issued under Domitian, likewise provided that all matters not explicitly covered by its clauses should be resolved as though their case concerned Roman citizens and was being heard in Rome by a praetor of the Roman people (Lex Irnitana 93 and cf. 85, 91; Gardner 2001).
Second, both individuals and communities increasingly had recourse to Roman officials to settle their disputes with each other, even in the Greek east, where there existed in the Hellenistic period widely-attested practices of third-party arbitration (Mitteis 1891; Marshall 1980; Ager 1996). At the communal level, the change is most visible in disputes over territory, where the trend was rapid and overwhelming (Rousset 1994: 100, 103, 108; Burton 2000).
Finally, the rulers of Rome continuously made new law. Ancient and modern scholars tend to distinguish legal rulings intended by their authors to settle individual cases from those designed for broader application; in practice, judges routinely accepted the value of imperial legal rulings as precedent, regardless of their genre (Ando 2000: 373-82). Such law-making, whatever its intent, had particular ramifications for the autonomy of cities when it addressed the status of individuals, not least in their liability for civic liturgies (Millar 1983). The Christian polemicist Tertullian spoke to a cultural, political, and legal phenomenon of the first importance when he proclaimed that the world of the late second century ce was manifestly better cultivated and better arranged than it had been formerly: ‘‘everywhere there are houses, everywhere people, everywhere the res publica, the commonwealth, everywhere life’’ (An. 30; M(Scsy 1962; Ando 2000: 1-15).
World History
