APPENDIX A Assembling and Processing Evidence

INTRODUCTION

this study began as a rather conventional exploration of the generation and archiving of public laws presented at Roman lawmaking assemblies. Over time the process of organizing and arranging the often scattered information on public laws turned into a monumental project far exceeding the capabili­ties of the usual stack of three-by-five-inch cards used by historians.

The overall database generated for the project included more than ten thou­sand items of information gleaned from all of the available proposals and end products of Rome's public lawmaking assemblies, the roughly 780 proposals or enacted laws to which reference has survived over the entire period of public lawmaking activity from 509 BCE to 98-96 CE (details on the coding of information are discussed later). The items ranged from the reported details of individual proposals and enacted laws—including dates, subjects, offices and names of public law sponsors, names of laws, and occurrence of vetoes or other obstructions—to the ancient authors or other sources of information reporting the details and the reliability of their reportage.

The process of compiling the particulars of public law proposals and enacted laws, which provided the core of my database, began with the record of attested laws and proposals assembled by G. Rotondi in Leges Publicae Populi Romani (1912; reprint, 1966), supplemented and corrected by a number of other standard refer­ence tools for Roman political history and Roman law.⁴ When necessary I also checked ancient sources of information, in particular to assemble information on the circumstances specific to each proposal or law. The resulting compilation of information about public law and lawmaking meetings and assemblies was processed with the help of SPSS to produce a variety of tables used throughout the text as appropriate to provide the basic framework for my discussion.

Notwithstanding my deployment of SPSS this is by no means a technical study in the sense that I used statistical techniques to give new meaning to the Roman experience. Rather I used the SPSS principally as an organizational tool to assemble the evidence for my study, to explore the resulting compilation— my “database”—and to develop straightforward measures of the frequency and content of public lawmaking activity, as well as the patterns of involvement of political leaders in public lawmaking sessions and the extent to which these patterns reflected changes in historical circumstances over time in the Roman world.

CODING TECHNIQUES

Information on proposals of Roman law was translated into computer-readable form through the use of a codebook—essentially a set of rules outlining how obser­vations on particular laws will be interpreted and recorded. There are three ways to code data: (1) empirically, that is, in its original form; for example, a year or a date or other numerical measure might be coded exactly as on the original; (2) analytically, by evaluating the original information and placing it into a predeter­mined category; for example, a year might be coded as within a particular decade or century; and (3) free coding, that is, by assigning a unique designator, or “tag,” to a particularly unique fragment of evidence; for example, in the case of Roman statutes the particularly unique and often complicated sources of informa­tion on the statute might be assigned a unique coding designator. Each form of coding displays unique advantages and disadvantages. The great advantage of cod­ing empirically is that it allows almost unlimited flexibility in the later processing of information—“raw” items of information can be arranged and rearranged in various categories.

CODING STANDARD VARIABLES FOR EACH PROPOSAL OF LAW OR ENACTED LAW

Actual input of the information to the computer is quite similar to filling out a blank spreadsheet. Each row on the spreadsheet represents a single proposal of law with unlimited bits of information translated into “variables” by the rules set out in the codebook and recorded one to a cell in the appropriate row.

For each proposal or enacted law in my study as many as possible of the fol­lowing variables as available were coded:

A. Unique Number

I assigned a number, or numbers, to each entry in Rotondi corresponding to each public law proposal or enacted law noted in that entry. Sometimes more than one number accompanies the entry because the consensus of scholarly opinion identifies additional proposals or laws either not included or not so dis­tinguished by Rotondi. Following Rotondi, I include any projected bills that never reached the stage of formal promulgation; that is, they were suggested or planned but never got beyond that point. The planned laws of P Clodius Pulcher, had he lived to be elected praetor, provide a case in point. In gen­eral on this point I was guided by the year-by-year summaries in T. R. S. Broughton, Magistrates of the Roman Republic (MRR), accompanying a magistrate’s year of office.

B. Date

The dates are as found in Rotondi or as corrected, generally in MRR or in some cases M. H. Crawford, ed., Roman Statutes. When the consensus of scholarly opinion holds that a proposal or law is “probably” to be dated to a particular year I have assigned it a certain date in that year (see next variable). Such dates are enclosed in parentheses in the master list.

C. Uncertain Dates: Free Code Sheet C

The precise dates of many laws are uncertain or unknown although there is in many cases general agreement as to their period or historical circumstances. In this column the numbers code the approximate or probable date or the range of years within which scholars usually place such laws. Probable dates, as noted previously, indicated by “perhaps” or “probably” in the codebook (and set in parentheses in my listing of laws) have also been included in the “Date” since scholarly consensus accepts such a date as very likely. Inasmuch as the lawmak­ing frequencies pertain to fairly broad periods in Roman history this column helps ensure that all laws are included in the appropriate period notwithstand­ing the difficulty of pinpointing the exact year of generation.

D. Assembly: Free Code Sheet D

In column D I code the assembly in which a law was produced. The purpose of this column is to show the incidence of legislative activity in the three assem­blies in Rome in which public law was enacted, in the case of leges, the tribal assembly (comitia tributa), or the centuriate assembly (comitia centuriata); and in the case of plebiscita, the plebeian tribal assembly (concilium plebis). There are many well-attested laws whose assembly is not reported. In many instances scholars identify such laws as “probably” a plebiscitum or “probably” a lex on the basis of the measure's content and the understanding of Roman pat­terns of lawmaking.

E. Office of Law Sponsor: Free Code Sheet E

In column E I code the public law sponsor's office. The purpose of this column is to help determine with as much precision as possible the lawmaking activity of the offices whose holders convened legislative assemblies in Rome. These officeholders are most routinely tribunes, consuls, or praetors. When scholars are undecided about whether a lawmaker was consul or praetor but are certain he was one or the other I have coded the possibility separately as “not a tri­bune.” When scholars surmise that a lawmaker was a tribune, a consul, or a praetor, despite the absence of sufficient information to determine his office, I have coded the individual as “office unknown.”

Other extraordinary offices were involved to differing degrees in the spon­sorship of law in Rome. On several recorded occasions, at different times, dic­tators, triumviri reipublicae constituendae, xviri legibus scribendis, and tribuni militum consulare potestate sponsor law. On one recorded occasion the official called the interrex, summoned in the absence of the consuls to select a dictator, makes law. Rotondi includes as law in his listing of public laws a popular decision man­aged by a priest (a Xvir sacrorum). Although scholars agree the event was not a legislative occasion, I have nonetheless coded this priesthood. Finally, the first emperor of Rome, Augustus, sponsored laws at times as a tribune, on the basis of his tribunician powers, and at times as a consul, on the basis of his con­sular powers. I have coded him separately.

The information to some extent reduplicates that given in column D. That is, when we know the sponsor's office we often know whether the law was a lex or a plebiscitum because certain magistrates convened certain assemblies.

F. Roman Title (Lex + Law Sponsor’s Nomen): Free Code Sheet F Column F codes the gentilicial or clan name (nomen) of the public law spon­sor that gave the enacted law its title, for example, the lex Cornelia or lex Fabia. Some laws take the names of two or more sponsors, especially consular laws, less often tribunician laws. The title appears to have been used in the archiv­ing of law. The purpose of this column is to help assemble the clans whose mem­bers over time were involved in the production of public law in Rome. It is not possible, however, to distinguish among the various, sometimes multiple branches of any one clan on the basis of title. Nor is it possible to identify the law sponsor on the basis of the law title: considerably fewer individual sponsors are reported than titles (see next variable). I do not distinguish between lex or roga­tio in this column.

G and H. Name of Sponsor: Free Code Sheets G and H

In these two columns I code the name of the public law sponsor when known. Individual sponsors are coded in G. If more than one man sponsored a proposal column H codes the additional sponsor or sponsors. These columns help iden­tify more precisely who among Rome's political leaders was involved in pre­senting public law proposals to the Roman people.

I. Subject: Free Code Sheet I

Column I codes the issues addressed by the laws generated in Rome's assem­blies. Here I indicate the subject of a measure based on the information avail­able about the content of a particular law or proposal. While Rotondi's summaries of the content of a measure are generally sufficient for the purpose, I have also checked ancient sources of information and consulted modern studies on points of interpretation or legal issues. Since the available information, whose sources are collected by Rotondi under each entry, rarely conveys the full scope of a measure, I have tried to stay as close as possible to simple questions in assign­ing subjects to each measure—what general area does the law address?—in order to come up with an overarching description of subject matter that embraces the entire content and avoids attributing motivation or aim. Obviously the effort works best when we are relatively well informed about the scope of a measure. When we are less well informed one suspects that even the baldest description of content misses the point and assigns the particular measure to an artificial analytical category rather than describes its subject matter. For instance, although many laws deal with “land distribution” their subject mat­ters individually differ significantly: the lex Flaminia of 232 BCE addresses the distribution of recently conquered and annexed land in north Italy to poor cit­izens in viritane assignments; the rogatio Servilia of 63 BCE addresses the pur­chase of privately owned land in Italy or in the provinces and its distribution, along with the small bits of remaining ager publicus in Italy and ager publicus in the provinces, to veterans and poor citizens who are to be led out in colonies, the arrangements to be made by a specially elected commission of ten men with imperium. Notwithstanding such differences, the subject matter of some laws, like land distribution laws, appears to allow cautious conflation. I have described the subject matter of laws that establish colonies as “the foundation of colonies,” notwithstanding differences as to the number of colonies, their status (Latin or Roman), their membership (poor citizens, or citizens and Latins, or veterans), and their location (Italy or abroad). Similarly I have used “the crime of repetundae,” “the crime of ambitus,” and so on to describe the subject matter of laws addressing these crimes, notwithstanding differences as to focus: many of such laws, when the details are known, address particular aspects of jury selection, court procedure, penalties, or individuals liable to prosecution for the crime. Similarly I have used “special commission of investigation” to describe the subject of a number of laws that set up special courts of inquiry, or quaestiones, to investigate specific misdeeds ranging from the wrongful enslave­ment of Ligurians and the misbehavior of the Vestals in the second century BCE to the murder of Clodius by Milo in the first century BCE. I have used “suspends or contravenes existing law” for a variety of measures setting aside existing law to accommodate a given set of circumstances. Given the differ­ences among all the laws the result in general has been a list of frequently unique subjects.

J. Namelaw: Free Code Sheet J

In column J I code the Latin name by which the law is conventionally known, as used in Rotondi or Crawford.

K. Reliability: Free Code Sheet K

In this column I code the reliability of the recorded information with respect to the acceptance of modern scholars that a proposal or law is in fact that. The reliability of some laws noted by Rotondi is low either because the law is thought more likely to be a Senate decree or the law is hypothetical—that is, scholars have assumed that a law should have been presented to the people in certain circumstances although there is no direct or indirect evidence that such was the case—or the law is generally refuted by scholars for other reasons. Hence I have not included the tabula Heracleensis, a bronze tablet engraved with a set of municipal regulations from Heraclea in southern Italy (RS i No. 24). While part of the text on this tablet may derive from a lex Iulia of 45, the text over­all is an assemblage of administrative enactments (RS 1:358-59). The reliabil­ity of other laws is high; that is, they are accepted without question by scholars as laws or proposals. These may be well documented or less well documented with respect to law sponsor, date, and content. Still other laws and proposals are merely probable; that is, they are generally accepted by scholars although they are poorly documented. For the purposes of measuring frequencies and ascertaining patterns for my study I have included only the items whose relia­bility is high or probable, including projected bills that were never promulgated.

L. Additional Unique Aspects: Free Code Sheet L

In this column I note the modern discussions or reference works I have con­sulted in checking Rotondi's entries and compiling my database.

M. Date-Quarter

In this column I assign the laws to a twenty-five-year block of time (based on columns B and C). If a law cannot be so assigned, I code the law as “date-quar­ter unknown.”

N through N₈2. Ancient Authors and Sources

I have coded ancient sources of information individually. These columns include all ancient authors from all periods who record information pertaining to a pub­lic law proposal or enacted law. Included also are all epigraphic and juristic sources on laws. The sources are assembled by Rotondi at the end of each entry and, in the case of surviving laws, Crawford.

Notes

1. Apple Computer, Inc., HyperCard: Reference Manual (Cupertino, CA, 1993).

2. SPSS Inc., SPSS 6.1: Base System User’s Guide, Part 1 and Part 2, Macintosh Version (Chicago, 1994).

3. These are collected in Malcovati 1967.

4. See appendix B for a discussion of sources.