The object of this chapter is to excavate a body of law that does not exist, namely, the one that governed aliens, particularly aliens in dispute with citizens or with aliens of discrepant citizenship, before Roman courts. In doing so, I hope to advance four interrelated claims beyond the particular work of recuperation I shall perform in respect to legal practice.

First, I urge that a number of the most distinctive formal mechanisms in Roman law and legal language—most notably the fiction and its kin—were developed precisely in order to accommodate before the law persons and things notionally...

This chapter pursues several interrelated problems at the intersection of law and the articulation of the late ancient state. They may be framed as an inquiry into the consequences, intended and otherwise, of Caracalla’s decision to grant citizenship to all—or nearly all—freeborn residents of the empire. For the Antonine Constitution would seem to mark, or should have marked, a turning point in the history of the empire: put concisely, one might ask whether the empire still was an empire when it no longer ruled over anyone. Put more elaborately, was there a corresponding shift in the perception, ambitions,...

Alberico Gentili’s extraordinary work De armis Romanis takes the form of a pair of speeches, the first an indictment of the injustices committed by the Romans in war, the second a speech of defense, on the justice of those same actions. The work lacks an introduction or conclusion in propria persona; the reader is thus left without guidance as to how to award the palm of victory. That said, Gentili did not write in a spirit of postmodern indeterminacy. His concerns were rather source-critical: “it is necessary,” his first speaker insists, “that I consider their own histories suspect. For they...

In late medieval and early modern Europe, Rome existed as exemplar among empires in two guises: one tacitly pagan, polite and powerful, urbanized and urbane; the other Christian, at war against heretic and infidel within and without, the proud and sinful instrument of Providence. In elisions typical of historical memory, the major revolutions that produced the Christian empire from the pagan were largely forgotten, while the wars of conquest and the domestic turmoil that issued from them were sidelined completely. This interested portrait has its roots in Christian recollections of Roman antiquity, in which the seizure and mastery of empire...

Chapter 3 urged that civil-law actions might usefully be situated in hermeneutic relation to international law in Roman antiquity, indeed, that civil-law forms and arguments played a paradeigmatic role in its initial elaboration. This chapter turns that historical argument back on itself: a principal claim of this chapter is that forms of domination that the Romans of the Republic exercised over foreigners came, in the establishment of monarchy, to be exercised by Romans over themselves. But this occurred within a political and legal regime that insisted on the vitality of the Republican forms through which social, political and legal conduct...