Research Project

Law Application in Roman Egypt: Towards Standardisation of a Plurality

Under the auspices of Käte Hamburger Kolleg I would like to study particular aspects of law application in Roman Egypt attempting to prove my view on the problem of law-application. My focus shall be on the so-called Gnomon of the Idios Logos: excerpts from the imperial instructions on the applicable norms issued for the supervisor of the Private Domain. On this material I would like to conduct two case-studies.

One would focus on the traces of senatus consulta in the Gnomon. It can be presumed that the senatorial decrees, which became the source of generally binding legal innovations in the imperial era, could also play a unifying role in the recently acquired province of a rich legal heritage. The Gnomon does not expressively cite senatorial decrees, yet my preliminary research has allowed me to identify many more than hitherto established. At the same time there exist lacunae in the documentation for some norms theoretically in force, as well as some surprising attestations of the abolished ones. All this may be extrapolated to more generic considerations on law functioning in Roman Egypt.

The second case are the norms concerning the Egyptian temple staff in the Gnomon. This research will complete my present investigation on the later second-century CE applications for permission to circumcise boys from the priestly families. The mechanism therein applied could also be seen as exemplary for law-application problems, since the Romans granting the requests actually applied the local law, which, moreover, was contrary to their public policy.

Both of these case-studies deal with the issue of standardisation: how the new authority deals with the local legal orders and how it attempts to systemise and standardise them. They also entertain a broader research question: how did the Romans actually apply the local orders, upkeeping the plurality of laws in action in Egypt.