Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman History – The Brief Version

the whole country and arranged in multiple levels of hierar chy. The Republican Roman government, by contrast, seems to have had something like hundreds of employees in Rome and perhaps a few dozen in each of a number of provinces (again, not including the military; there was no state postal service). Additionally, most of these workers were so closely tied to one or the other of the elected magistrates that their power was probably even more limited than their small number would suggest. For instance, the major magistrates were attended by “lictors,” a sort of honor guard armed (at least symbolically) with axes and rods. It has been suggested that these men could have served some kind of police function, but that seems unlikely, since they were only allowed to operate in the pres ence of the magistrate. For those who lived through it, the transition from Republic to Empire must have been a complicated and uneven process, dat ing from perhaps 49 bc (when Julius Caesar marched on Rome and seized power) to 31 (when his grand-nephew now known as Augustus emerged as the survivor of a series of civil wars), or perhaps even later if one wants to wait for all the formal features of the new order to come into being. Different players came, went, and changed sides over this period. And questions have been raised about how important legal formalisms were to the creation of that new order. This modern skepticism is The Empire

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