Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

of land subject to “the legal authority of the gods” and gener ally not subject to human buying and selling. A legal textbook points out that only land in Italy could technically be “sacred” or “religious,” but adds that provincial land that would other wise qualify for one of these statuses was “treated as” sacred or religious. We happen to have some confirming information a little closer to the ground. A handbook for surveyors mentions these same categories of land in a way that explicitly raises the issue of Italian versus provincial land. Interestingly, here the location of the parcel of the land was important for practi cal rather than for theoretical reasons. Italian land was more densely settled, and so it was more likely that neighbors might start to encroach on sacred places. The legal textbook says to ignore the technicality; the surveying manual does ignore it entirely. But if we treat “sacred” land as if it were genuinely sacred, that does not tell us which land counts as “sacred” in the first place. Roman religious rules were very place-specific, so there were no standards to universalize, even if the authori ties had wanted to do so. Perhaps, then, if the locals recog nized some place as sacred by their own standards, Roman law would kick in, and its protections would apply. This general rule is never actually attested, but in at least one specific case (reburial after a flood) we have an imperial pronouncement that local custom may substitute for the judgment that would have been rendered by the religious authorities in Rome [27] . There is also evidence of a similar substitution of rules regarding sur veillance of pregnant women. The Edict laid out a remarkably elaborate set of procedures to track a widow’s pregnancy and

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