Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman History – The Brief Version

king, rather than a legislature of the sort now suggested by the name. Whether the topic is law, government, or nearly anything else, we are very poorly informed about Rome of the monarchi cal period. Our surviving written sources mostly come from about 500 years and more after the fact; this is nearly twice the time between the present day and the founding of the United States of America. We have a number of fragments of laws attributed to “kings,” and even to particular ones of them. Some of these may actually be genuine. A couple, for instance, contain a penalty clause meaning something like “let him be dedicated to the gods.” The same wording happens to appear in an otherwise hard-to-read law that survives from a rare inscription of the period on stone. Still, it is nearly impossible at this distance to tell which fragments are genuine, which are later inventions inspired by some bit of real historical informa tion, and which are just pure fantasy.

The Republic

In the standard Roman story, the kings were thrown out sud denly, and replaced by a pair of officials known as consuls. In theory, the consuls held most of the powers of the king, but in practice they were greatly limited because of the sharing of power between two men, because they had to get elected, and because they served only a year in office. (Reelection was quite rare.) They were chosen by the “people” (that is, the adult male

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