“WE USE THE COMMON LAWS OF THE ROMANS”

Two passages from the treatise on epideictic oratory ascribed to Menander (a native of Laodicea on the Lycus, one of the traditional assize centres of the Roman prov­ince of Asia) and usually dated to the tetrarchic period (with some probability to the 290s), have become the loci classici for assessing the impact of the Consitutio An- toniniana, even though, as Joseph Modrzejewski has emphasized in his fundamen­tal study, Menander makes no direct mention of it.^[79] When discussing “how to praise cities for accomplishments” in Book III of his work, Menander stresses that the traditional topic of praising a city for its just laws is no longer relevant: “the topic of laws is of no use, since we conduct public affairs by the common laws of the Romans.”^{[80] [81] A bit later on, he returns to this theme and states that “in public af­fairs, we consider whether the city accurately lays down customs and the subjects of laws - inheritances by heirs and other legal topics.}

While these statements need to be qualified (the first is accompanied by the admission that “customs... vary from city to city” and elsewhere Menander makes the rather sweeping claim that “nowadays it is difficult to find piety in individuals”),^[82] the contrast between what used to be the case in the High Empire and what is the state of affairs in Menander’s own time is indeed clear. A useful comparison can be made with the beginning of the Plea for Christians addressed by Athenagoras of Athens to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus sometime in AD 175-178.

A famous imperial letter granting city status to the settlement of Tymandus in Pisidia, by an unknown emperor but usually dated to the tetrarchic period, conforms with Menander’s world picture: unlike earlier grants and confirmations of civic status from the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial period, such as, above all, the recently uncovered letter of Hadrian to the city of Naryca in Locris, it contains no reference to the existence of local laws as a necessary accompaniment of city status.^[84]

The disappearance of the traditional framework of civic legal rights can also be seen in a document from Ephesus, which is more often adduced as evidence for the survival of city privileges. A response, most likely by a Roman proconsul of Asia to a petition of the Ephesians concerning the primacy of their city in the province, refers them to “what has been selected in Ulpian’s On Duties from ancient laws and from edicts [-------------------- ] and from the decrees of the sacred senate.”^[85] The lettering and

internal indications in the document, as I have argued elsewhere, are compatible with any date in the period between the reign of Gordian III and the tetrarchic pe­riod, so while this text does not provide any clearer terminus ante quem than the passages in Menander, it undoubtedly points to the same situation.

Any direct reference to treaties with Rome as sources of law is conspicuous by its absence. Even though the document does not deal with private law issues di­rectly, the picture is suggestive of the situation in that sphere as well: the basis of local privileges has changed, and, by contrast with the earlier period, there is a con­scious effort to treat “provincial Roman law” as a coherent system, the sources of which are limited in their scope.^[87]

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