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Kaius Tuori, The Emperor of Law: The Emergence of Roman Imperial Adjudication

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Author
DOI10.3366/elr.2019.0590
Published date01 September 2019
Date01 September 2019
Pages459-461

The role of the Princeps as legal arbiter stands at the heart of the transformation of ancient Rome from Republic to Empire. The ability of Augustus and his successors to sit in legal judgement on civil and criminal trials reflected the absolute shift in power in the Roman political order. In part, this was anticipated by the actions of the military potentates of the falling Republic, but it was not until much later that the position of emperor as legal arbiter became fully established. The topic is a complex one, with crucial gaps in the contemporary legal evidence, leaving us to rely heavily upon later narrative traditions and interpretations. We tend to ignore the uncertain legislative steps of Augustus, and follow those later Roman writers who place the early Julio-Claudians into a pre-existing, and by then, firmly established mode of imperial adjudication. We also are drawn to effective legal arbiters and administrators such as Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, for whom we have much greater legal evidence. In viewing the development of the legal persona of the emperor as a supreme court retrospectively, we ignore at our peril, how fundamentally new and uncertain this was, and how fully the Empire removed the shackles of the old Republican order. This is a question of utmost importance in understanding the legal world of ancient Rome; and one that Tuori's volume seeks to answer.

I should begin by saying that this is a very impressive work. It is written with pace and verve, and provides an almost encyclopaedic understanding of the Roman political and legislative history. It provides a persuasive reassessment of the role of emperor and the legal fabric of the ancient world. Although it belongs to a wider field of Roman legal history (with echoes of Millar, Bleiken, Kely, Jones and Honoré), in another sense it also feels distinctly separate to those others’ works, a pathfinder for a new way of looking at Roman legislation. Tuori draws upon a vast body of scholarly literature, and behind each of his observations there rests a subtle and reasoned engagement with prevalent scholarly perspectives. So fluently is this work written, that it is not until the final pages of each chapter that the reader is reminded of how new and important some of these ideas really are, and how different the conclusion he reaches is when placed against the prevailing interpretations. This is a deeply impressive work, and one that offers an important (and in parts entirely persuasive)...

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