Jill Harries, LAW AND CRIME IN THE ROMAN WORLD Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org), Key Themes in Ancient History, 2007. x + 148 pp. ISBN 9780521535328 (pb). £15.99. ISBN 9780521828208 (hb). £45.
| DOI | 10.3366/E1364980909001747 |
| Pages | 372-374 |
| Author | O F Robinson |
| Date | 01 May 2009 |
| Published date | 01 May 2009 |
Although I am described in the preface to this book as “the doyenne of Roman criminal law”, I should make it plain at the outset that I am a lawyer and Jill Harries is a historian, and that we therefore look differently at the same things. But I did enjoy reading this book. Most of the criticisms I shall make spring from this difference of perspective, and the most serious – the absence of footnotes (or endnotes) – is the responsibility of the publishers not the author. On this point, it is somewhat unsatisfactory only to have a list of “References” after the “Bibliographical Essay”, not a full bibliography, though the guidance to further reading for the various chapters is helpful, even if I would have expected a reference to Sherwin-White rather than merely to Radice for a commentary on the Letters of the Younger Pliny.
First, a brief description (and a lawyer's, I suspect) of what the book covers. Chapter 1, “Competing discourses”, is concerned with defining the book's subject matter, and here the lawyer and historian are perhaps farthest apart. Lawyers, almost without exception, write about crimes, and about the procedure for trials of those crimes; historians worry about whether crime is “purely a social construct”, and whether there is a counter-culture, and similar questions. Chapter 2, “Public process and the legal tradition”, outlines the history of the criminal courts at Rome and their procedures, pointing out that actual court practice and the influence of custom had significant, if intangible, effects. Further, the legal system (civil as well as criminal) was predicated on Rome the city, and needed adaptation for the requirements of the provinces. The statutes of the Late Republic and very early Empire creating the
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