CONCLUSION
I have argued above for a cautious approach. While the decline of local law in third- century Asia Minor is evident, and a number of plausible scenarios explaining it can be developed, the striking fact remains that if we follow the fate of local jurisdiction community by community, new developments were happening at strikingly differÂent paces.
Even if we limit ourselves to previously-privileged communities, for which (perhaps unsurprisingly) our evidence is best, we can see that the Roman law of property was being applied in some at the same time that others were asking to reconfirm their jurisdiction over the causae pecuniariae. Although the troubled and uncertain situation in the region following Valerian’s defeat in AD 259 might, somewhat paradoxically, have been one of the causes for the final disappearance of local privileges, it is clear that the significance of Roman law in some of the priviÂleged communities increased at an earlier date. Significantly, one model that does not seem to fit the evidence is that of local law continuing its existence as a â€?cusÂtom’, invoked â€?where they did not clash with Roman principles and interests’, even if that was the eventual direction of travel.60 Rather, we are still dealing with comÂpeting jurisdictions applying their own rules, but in a situation where in the case of Roman (as opposed to civic) courts there was considerably less pressure to distinÂguish between imperial and local law.The model favored here is, accordingly, one of a gradual and uneven developÂment, driven in the first place by the increased accessibility of Roman justice - a
sources,” with which she also connects late reconfirmations of city privileges and creation or endorsement of new civic festivals, a perspective not irrelevant to the concerns of this paper. For cities celebrating their eleutheria down to the reign of Gallienus, Guerber 2012, 490 n. 150.
58 Johnston 2007a, 241.
59 Harl 1987, 94; Butcher 1988, 21; decline in the number of attested civic mints usefully tabuÂlated in Harl 1987, 107, and (for the province of Asia only) by M. Spoerri Butcher, RPC VII.1 (2006), 57 and 59. For a salutary note of caution concerning these figures, Johnston 2007b, 213. For a recent survey of the views on the cessation of local coinage, Johnston 2007a, 242-3.
60 Garnsey 2004, 146.
development which preceded the Constitutio Antoniniana - but reinforced first by the universal grant of citizenship (which seems to have encouraged the use of RoÂman law in the spheres where it was previously less common, as the example of the Termessian epitaphs shows) and then by the breakdown and subsequent re-estabÂlishment of central authority in the 260s-270s. As Rostovtzeff has observed in a different context, “the complexity of life should never be forgotten and... no single feature should ever be regarded as basic and decisive.”[126]
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