In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Appian and the Aftermath of the Gracchan ReformDaniel J. GargolaAppian's History of the Gracchan reform is arguably the single most detailed and coherent account of it. Early in the first book of his Civil Wars he outlines the development of a crisis in the countryside and the terms of the law Ti. Sempronius Gracchus (tr. pl. 133) proposed to remedy it; he describes the struggle to pass the measure (...) and efforts of the tribune's opponents to block it; he tells of attempts to implement the law in the years after Tiberius' death; and he summarizes the legislative agenda and the political activities of C. Gracchus, Tiberius' younger brother, when he was tribune of the plebs in 123 and 122. Appian brings his history of the Gracchi to a close with a description of a series of laws put forward in the years following the death of the younger Gracchus and the ways they reversed earlier gains. Land reform continued to be a central issue in the conflicts that would bring the Roman Republic to an end, and historians often have relied upon Appian's short description of post–Gracchan legislation to reconstruct the politics of the matter in the last two decades of the second century. After all, he provides the only surviving overview of the agrarian legislation of these years. But scholars have found it difficult to reconcile Appian's claims with other evidence. The problem, a closer inspection will show, lies in the assumption that Appian produced or intended to produce a straightforward and unbiased account and the resulting conviction that these measures should be easily and readily identifiable. Instead I argue here that Appian has presented a highly schematic version of events that reveals more about his methods as a historian than it does about the laws themselves or the policies of those who proposed them.Appian's Account and Modern Interpretations of ItAt first glance Appian's version (BC 1.27.121–24) of the aftermath of reform is simple and straightforward. Using the death of C. Gracchus [End Page 555] as his starting point, Appian first reports the passage of a law permitting recipients of allotments to sell them and then claims that the rich immediately bought the land from the poor or took it by force. After this, a tribune, Spurios Borios or Bourios in the manuscripts, successfully proposed a law ending the distribution of public land, which those in possession were to own on payment of a rent, and establishing instead a distribution of the funds raised in this fashion. Not much later, another tribune put an end to the rent and the distribution of money that depended upon it. As a result, Appian holds, the people lost everything, and there were still fewer citizens and soldiers. He finishes with a reference to a fifteen–year period, although an apparent lacuna makes its significance uncertain.Efforts to anchor this account firmly in the proper historical context have focused on a range of issues that have proven remarkably difficult to resolve.1 The first problem concerns the relationship, if any, between Appian's three laws and other agrarian legislation known to have been enacted in the years following the death of C. Gracchus. Cicero is the sole source for one measure. On two occasions he makes vague references to a law of Sp. Thorius that probably was passed in the latter half of the penultimate decade of the century.2 Neither is very informative. One merely records a jest involving the pasturing of animals on public lands made in the course of a senatorial debate on a lex Thoria.3 The second is potentially more useful. In Brutus (136) Cicero notes briefly the qualities as a speaker of a Sp. Thorius and connects him with a law regulating public lands: Sp. Thorius satis valuit in populari genere dicendi, is qui agrum publicum vitiosa et inutili lege vectigali [vectigale codd.] levavit. These brief remarks provide the sole grounds for emending [End Page 556] the name of the author of Appian's second measure, Spurios Borios or Bourios, to Sp. Thorius.4Unfortunately, Cicero's seemingly simple characterization of the Thorian... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian EconomyDaniel J. GargolaDennis P. Kehoe. Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xiv 1 269 pp. Cloth, $42.50, £29.95 (UK, Europe).This book is more than an investigation into an aspect of Roman law and legal thought. At the very beginning, Dennis Kehoe clearly identifies his goal: “My (...) purpose in this study is to clarify the basic relationships characterizing the agrarian economy of the early Roman Empire by analyzing the economic mentality that guided upper-class Romans in managing their wealth. My conviction is that the type of agrarian planning based on upper-class conceptions of investment and profit played a fundamental role in shaping the Roman economy as a whole.... In this study, I propose to address this problem by analyzing the assumptions that the Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian and in other classical sources made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. I base my analysis on the legal sources because, as I shall demonstrate, they offer a more comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans than we can gain from other types of evidence, including literary evidence, documentary papyri, and inscriptions” (vii).The author’s awareness of the problems in using legal evidence to shed light on larger issues and his openness about his own assumptions and about the limitations of the methods and the sources he has chosen to employ are among the work’s great strengths. In marked contrast with some other investigations of such matters, Kehoe does not assume that laws provide a simple, straightforward, and transparent entry into the structure and organization of economy and society. The work opens with an examination of the legal sources as evidence. Their condition offers one problem. The writings of the late Republican and early Imperial jurists are preserved largely in relatively brief citations included in the great collections of the sixth-century a.d.: Justinian’s Digest and Code. As Kehoe notes, this presents a major problem for investigators: to what extent do these passages represent the original—that is, was obsolete material removed systematically, and were the passages adjusted to fit the compilers’ concerns? Following authorities such as M. Kaser and F. Wieacker, the author takes an optimistic view of the matter, suggesting that “contemporary scholarship is justified in moving away from the suspicion that the Digest is so thoroughly interpolated that the opinions of the classical jurists can only be recovered after exhaustive reconstruction of the texts” (9). While accepting the possibility of interpolation in individual cases, he has based his study on the “belief that the existing collections of legal texts do allow us to trace the thinking, in particular the economic thinking, of the classical Roman legal authorities” (10).Having declared his intention to regard the citations as reasonably accurate reflections of their originals, Kehoe then turns to a more central question: the extent to which juristic writings reflect actual conditions. One school of [End Page 323] thought, represented by scholars such as Alan Watson (The Spirit of Roman Law [Athens, Ga., 1995]), suggests that Roman jurists operated within a system of traditional representations, maintained as if fossilized long after the conditions that had given rise to them had changed, and that legal writers largely wrote about internal problems in interpretation that had arisen within this system. The jurists, then, did not address problems of their own day, nor were they interested in adapting the law to new circumstances, and their opinions need bear little resemblance to actual arrangements in their own time and place. Others, however, are more convinced of the timeliness of Roman legal writing. Scholars such as B. W. Frier (Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome [Princeton 1980]) and S. D. Martin (The Roman Jurists and the Organization of Private Building in the Late Republic and Early Empire [Brussels 1989]) maintain that Roman jurists consciously and directly addressed in their writings the social and economic concerns of their contemporaries in the governing elite.Once again, Kehoe takes care to situate... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Laws of the Roman People: Public Law in the Expansion and Decline of the Roman RepublicDaniel J. GargolaCallie Williamson. The Laws of the Roman People: Public Law in the Expansion and Decline of the Roman Republic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. xxviii + 506 pp. 39 tables. 4 maps. Cloth, $75.Laws enacted by citizen assemblies occupy a prominent place in the history of the Roman (...) Republic. In this large book, Williamson aims to examine the culture and practices of lawmaking and to link legislation to Roman expansion over Italy and to the creation of structures of accommodation of sufficient strength to allow the formation of a fairly integrated Italian world. Williamson has set a large task for herself, one that addresses many major themes in Roman history, and she has produced a wide-ranging and complicated argument that should be set out in detail.The book is divided into three broad parts, each made up of three substantial chapters. Part 1 is the core. In the first chapter, Williamson addresses change over time in the frequency of legislative assemblies, the relationship between frequency of lawmaking and periods of crisis, and the functions of public lawmaking. She finds that legislative activity was concentrated in times of crisis, but that the number of laws proposed or enacted in non-crisis years increased markedly from the third to the first centuries and that Roman officeholders proposed laws primarily in instances where the matter was controversial, suggesting that the primary function of lawmaking through popular assemblies was a legitimizing one in just those circumstances where the legitimacy of an action might be questioned.In general, these conclusions are possible and, in some cases, probable, [End Page 469] but they rest on foundations that are not as firm as one would like. Williamson's demonstration centers on a collection of laws and proposed laws from c. 350 to 44 B.C.E., which she has arranged chronologically in twenty-five-year segments that furnish the means to discern changes over time and that, in later chapters, provide the essential temporal structure to integrate lawmaking with a wide range of developments. In appendix B, intended to justify her approach, she acknowledges and dismisses two potential sources of error: the possible use of a statistically invalid sampling procedure and the possible bias introduced by the differing interests of the authors who provide the bulk of the evidence: Cicero, Livy, Cassius Dio, Appian, Plutarch, and Polybius. Yet there is another possibility that Williamson does not consider. Our sources certainly favor some periods over others. Thus, historical accounts become fuller for the Second Punic War and as they approach the first century, just the periods that supposedly exhibit clear signs of an increase in legislative activity. We may know of more laws or proposed laws in periods of war and political conflict than in times of peace, not only because more laws were put forward then but also because such times attracted more interest on the part of historians. Finally, substantial portions of the texts of Livy, Dio Cassius, and Polybius are lost, and the gaps cover much of the third and second centuries. The evidence, then, is extremely uneven over time.One way that Williamson uses the evidence is especially problematic. She notes that three methods of enacting programs or regulations existed simultaneously: magisterial edicts, senatorial decrees, and popular legislation. Since she finds that the kinds of matters addressed in legislation are indistinguishable from the range of issues addressed by the senate, she concludes that, to some extent, it was a matter of choice whether a magistrate went to the senate or to the people for authorization. Thus, when a proposal was moved forward by a law rather than by an edict or senatorial decree, she suggests that the measure was probably controversial and required the legitimizing function of a popular assembly. Unfortunately, our sources often fail to set out clearly just what procedures a magistrate followed. Sometimes, as Williamson notes, a senatorial decree and the proposal of legislation mark successive stages in the legislative process. And certain operations, such as the creation of provincial assignments or promagistracies, could be addressed... (shrink)