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Laying Down the Law

In The Empire of the Tetrarchs C. has concentrated on providing a finely-grained account of the 'vast range of texts produced by the emperors of the tetrarchic era and their palatine officials' and of 'the problems of relating the picture created by surviving imperial pronouncements to the limiting realities of government at the time' (p. vii). The result is a useful collation of often obscure and fragmentary sources; clearly the product of much painstaking work and of a close and careful attention to the detail which matters. The first two chapters survey the sources for surviving tetrarchic legal decisions; Chapter 3 offers a general introduction to imperial rescripts; Chapter 4 tidies up Tony Honore's identification of tetrarchic magistri libellorum (see his Emperors and Lawyers [2nd edn, Oxford, 1994], 139-91); Chapter 5 lists the evidence for the mixed status, occupation, and geographical origin of the recipients of rescripts; Chapter 6 provides a chronological catalogue raisonne of surviving imperial letters, 284-313 (with 314-324 covered more briefly in Appendix D); Chapter 7 deals likewise with imperial edicts, 284-324; Chapter 8 is devoted to the 'Prices Edict'; Chapter 9 discusses the role of the governor; Chapter 10 that of the emperor, arguing for considerable personal input in the formulation of policy and the drafting of legal documents; finally, Chapter 11 explores the division of powers in the imperial college and the survival of the 'tyrant' Licinius' legislation. There is much here to delight the specialist eye; but also a scattering of more general observations. As models of level-headed common sense, I would single out the following discussions: the dubious relationship between surviving laws and actual legislative output (pp. 12, 30-1, 54-7, 163-4); a highly conservative approach to altering the dating or text of surviving laws (pp. 13-19); the high cost of litigation as a means of restricting legal action (pp. 111-14); the similarly prohibitive cost of petitioning an emperor (pp. 43-4,119-22).