THE EMPIRE AND THE LAW

The last century of the Roman republic was marked by confusion and conflict between those who wanted to maintain the traditional constitu­tion, even with its weakness of leadership, and those who wanted ttrong government, even at the cost of dispensing with the legal forms.

When the republic was replaced by the empire, the first emperor, Augustus, was anxious to reassure his subjects by preserving the fagade of the republican constitution. At first the popular assemblies met as before. Since, however, they had no provision for representation and required the personal presence of the citizens who wished to participate, they consisted in practice of the rabble who lived in the city of Rome itself. The emperors quietly prevented significant proposals for legisla­tion from being put to the assemblies. For a while resolutions of the senate, a body consisting largely of ex-magistrates, acquired the force of law in their place.

The praetorian edict, published annually by successive praetors, had reached the point where it was hardly altered from one year to the next and in the early second century, on the orders of the Emperor Hadrian, it was put into permanent form by the jurist Julian. It begins with the procedure of a formulary action from the summoning of the defendant to the end of the stage before the praetor, covers the various remedies, then the enforcement of judgments after the trial and ends with a section dealing with interdicts and defences. It is likely that this order was mod­elled on that of the Twelve Tables.

The emperor himself assumed legislative powers and ‘imperial con­stitutions' were now recognised as a source of law with the force of a lex.

By the second century AD, the Roman empire extended from the southern half of Britain, Gaul and the Iberian peninsula in the west, along the west bank of the Rhine and the south bank of the Danube, to Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt in the east. Roman citizenship now became less exclusive than it had been in the republic. By the end of the repub­lic, citizenship had been extended to most of those living in Italy, that is, modern Italy south of the river Po. The imperial government now used the selective grant of citizenship as a means of integrating those living outside Italy into a single whole and thus broke the connection between citizenship and Italian origin.

Increasingly, political, social and economic advancement went to those who were citizens, but now citizenship was compatible with the maintenance of local loyalties, so long as they did not challenge Roman domination. Ambitious provincials were encouraged to acknowledge Rome as a ‘common fatherland'. Indeed in the early empire, it was the members of the provincial aristocracies, particularly in the west, such as in Spain, who were the most prominent upholders of the traditional Roman values. The functioning of imperial government came to depend on such men. They served first as army officers and financial agents, then entered the Roman senate, rose to be consul and thereafter governed the military provinces on the frontiers.

Imperial policy encouraged municipia, more or less self-governing communities of citizens or Latins (who had many but not all the rights of citizens).

The first two centuries of the Christian era marked the high point of Roman legal development, in the sense that technically it had reached its most sophisticated and refined form, and the period is known as the classical period of Roman law. These centuries also witnessed some of the most barbaric atrocities of brutal emperors, such as Nero, Caligula and Domitian. There is an apparent paradox that their reigns should be part of the culmination of Rome's glory as a legal state. The answer is to be found in a tacitly accepted distinction that separated private law from other branches of law. Private law concerned the relations between private individuals. The early emperors accepted that there was little advantage to be obtained from interfering with private law and that it was good policy to preserve and develop the private law with no unnec­essary change.

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