BiblioVault - Books about 510-30 B.C

Murder Was Not a Crime

Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic

By Judy E. Gaughan

University of Texas Press, 2009

Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder Was Not a Crime describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder.

With implications that could modify the most fundamental beliefs about the Roman republic, Gaughan's research maintains that Roman criminal law did not contain a specific enactment against murder, although it had done so prior to the overthrow of the monarchy. While kings felt an imperative to hold monopoly over the power to kill, Gaughan argues, the republic phase ushered in a form of decentralized government that did not see itself as vulnerable to challenge by an act of murder. And the power possessed by individual families ensured that the government would not attain the responsibility for punishing homicidal violence.

Drawing on surviving Roman laws and literary sources, Murder Was Not a Crime also explores the dictator Sulla's "murder law," arguing that it lacked any government concept of murder and was instead simply a collection of earlier statutes repressing poisoning, arson, and the carrying of weapons. Reinterpreting a spectrum of scenarios, Gaughan makes new distinctions between the paternal head of household and his power over life and death, versus the power of consuls and praetors to command and kill.

[more]

Public Office in Early Rome

Ritual Procedure and Political Practice

Roberta Stewart

University of Michigan Press, 2010

". . . [A]n excellent, erudite book."
---Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Studies of Roman politics have traditionally emphasized individual personalities or groups of personalities and have explained political behavior in terms of contests for individual power or group power. By contrast, Roberta Stewart focuses on being the religious institution of the "allotment" of duties among elected officials as a primary control on Roman politics. She examines in detail the procedure of allotment, the roles of popular election and allotment in defining public authority and duty, and the relationship between the Roman Senate and elected officials. Allotment is seen to reflect Republican ideology about the divine sanction of Roman leadership, military enterprise, and empire.

Allotment is examined in particular historical contexts, and the successive formations of public office in 444, 367, and 242 b.c.e. are analyzed as a series of political solutions in an evolving cultural context. The discussion documents the ritual definition of allotments and the historical development of distinctive features of Republican political office: the equal authority of colleagues (collegiality), the individual authority and accountability for an allotted function (provincia), the procedural alternative to allotment (comparatio), and the hierarchy of offices with imperium (the consuls and praetors).

Public Office in Early Rome will be of great interest for scholars and students of Roman religion, government, and history.

Roberta Stewart is Associate Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College.

[more]

The Roman Republic in Political Thought

Fergus Millar

Brandeis University Press, 2002

It is a fact that the very long-lived Roman Republic has consistently played a surprisingly slight role in political theory and discussions about the nature of democracy, forms of government, and other matters, particularly when compared to the enormous attention paid to fifth-century BCE Athenian democracy. Fergus Millar re-opens the issue of how the Roman Republic was understood and used by political thinkers from the Ancient World to the present. Describing both the reality of the late Roman Republic and showing how its nature was distorted even by contemporary sources, he tracks its treatment (or absence) in political discourse from Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and in debates surrounding the creation of the American constitution, particularly in the Federalist papers. In brief, clear prose, with quotations in English from important works, and economical use of endnotes, he reinforces his unconventional thesis about the significance of direct democracy in the late Roman Republic. In the process, he also provides an unprecedented tour through 2000 years of Western political theory from the point of view of the Roman Republic, in general, and theories of direct democracy and the balance of power, in particular.

[more]