Choosing an advocate
No litigant has left any description of how he went about choosing an advocate to undertake his case. If within the family one had a capable speaker with courtroom experience, surely he would have been the most obvious choice.
It is thus somewhat surprising that we hear of only one case in which a litigant was related to her advocate. Domitia, a great-niece of Augustus and aunt of Nero, was represented by her husband, Crispus Passienus (whom Seneca the Elder considered to be one of the foremost orators of the Augustan age) in her dispute with her brother, Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus (Nero's father), over an unpaid debt; in this situation, however, it is possible that since Passienus was both her husband and a skilled orator he was serving as her representative rather than as her advocate and thus was, in a way, arguing the case as the litigant.62 If no family members were capable, litigants no doubt approached friends. We have far better evidence from the advocate's perspective for the impact of friendship and patronage on an advocate's decision to undertake a case, a topic that will be considered later. From the perspective of the litigant, the only relevant information concerns Scutarius. A veteran of Augustus' army, Scutarius approached the emperor in public and asked him to defend him on a charge of iniuria. Augustus at first claimed he was too busy and tried to pass the case to a friend. The veteran, however, insisted Augustus undertake the case himself, arguing that he had not handed off to someone else his military duty to Augustus. Augustus accepted the case.63With so little relevant information we can determine very few of the criteria on which litigants based their selection of an advocate. In the case of Scutarius, we must assume that he viewed Augustus as his most powerful patron, and also felt that his service to Augustus warranted such a favor in return. At the same time, it is possible that the pressure Scutarius applied to Augustus was not derived solely from the immediate military link. He approached Augustus “in public”, and the bad publicity that could have resulted from Augustus turning his back on a veteran was certainly something Augustus would have tried to avoid, since he made much of his connections to the Roman army.64 Publicity was also a concern for those of lower status than Augustus. The negative public opinion that might attach to a person if he refused to represent someone who felt a legitimate claim to his aid may have made many men hesitate to refuse a litigant.
More on the topic Choosing an advocate:
- Choosing books
- Excursus 2. The advocate as ?representative’
- The advocate in the courtroom
- THE ADVOCATE
- The uses of advocacy to client and advocate
- The advocate was the central element in the Roman courtroom, the lynchpin between the various participants; through him the litigant spoke, with him the opposing counsel argued, and by him the audience was moved and the judge(s) persuaded.
- CONTENTS
- Factors in the refusal of cases
- Status, pay, the “decline of oratory”, and terminology
- Provincial and out-of-town advocates
- The identity of the audience
- Audience participation
- Time investment and workload
- The litigant in the courtroom
- ILLUSORY INTERDISCIPLINARITY
- Conclusion
- Public choice without prejudice
- There are two purposes to this chapter. Having formulated in the previous chapter an understanding of the types of cases that advocates accepted, we now must consider the impact that such an undertaking had on an advocate’s life
- Introduction