Clifford Ando on Sovereignty and Territoriality in Republican Rome
Legal fictions of “there” as “here”, cadastral grids, legibility, bounded political space, control, indirect governance, a posteriori empire construction
Clifford Ando wrote:
[MGH: To facilitate my filing of this exhibit I note Ando’s introduction reference to “the state’s desire to render to render the world legible (in James C. Scott’s terms)”]
Part 1, Chapter 2
4. The fiction of “there” as “here”
The language of “here and there” has an important correlate in civil procedure as it is ordained for far-away localities in statutes originating at Rome. … However, the act of imagination – or translation, if you will – required by procedural fictions is regularly far more complex, and involves far more than the juridical status of persons. … The fiction … effects a translation not simply of persons, who might potentially be alien or Latin, across a status boundary; nor simply of the positive law framework, which is to be that of Rome or, rather, that which would apply if the case were being heard at Rome. That is the crux: it is not that the law of the Roman city-state was imposed through an act of imperial sovereignty on alien parties. It is still citizen’s law, meaning, of course, the law that Roman citizens have made for themselves. Instead, alien persons dwelling in alien polities are told to conduct their legal affairs as if they were Romans dwelling at Rome, bringing their disputes before a magistrate whom they have elected, applying law that has been democratically authorized. In short, those who are there are ordered to imagine themselves as if here. …
… [The] actual fictions preserved in Roman statutes, much more than the fiction of citizenship discussed in jurisprudence, effectively employ civil procedure to create a unified jural-political space (and polity) from what remained, in public law, a heterogeneous world, which included persons who were not Roman dwelling on lands that were legally alien.
5. Drawing empire under Rome
I want now to return to a problematic that I named at the start, namely, the relationship between metropolitan knowledge and its objects in the messy social reality of the landscape of empire. Thus far, I have engaged this theme in considering the ways in which legislation crafted at the center can advance authoritative classifications of social phenomena in the world at large. I want now to turn more directly to the production, codification and use of knowledge. My case study will concern boundary disputes and cadastral maps.
The points I wish to make about cartographic thinking and practice in the Roman world are three. First, I want to illustrate a distinction between discursive accounts of boundaries as they existed in the world and the representation of cadasters in metropolitan practice. Second, I will claim that knowledge of land as property was created, affirmed and stored as knowledge in the center. Just as in respect of the law, so in respect of topographic and cadastral information, abstraction was necessary to the acts of aggregation essential to sovereignty. The material distance between the locus of (Roman) knowledge and the objects of (imperial) governance in turn justified the institutionalization of authorities possessing the techniques necessary to endow sovereign abstraction with practical efficacy. (This is the gap between metropolitan fictions and local interpretive authority to which I referred earlier, now described in other terms.) Third, awareness of this need to relate abstractions to the world generated one of the most characteristic features of Roman cadastral maps, namely, the coexistence within single frames of multiple forms of representation.
Writing and drawing cadasters
Allow me start by effecting a simple contrast, between a discursive (epigraphic) record of the resolution of a boundary dispute and the most elementary representation of a cadastral grid. Here are extracts from the inscribed resolution of a boundary dispute between the Genoans and Viturians as settled by Quintus and Marcus Minucius Rufus in 117 BCE:
The boundaries of the private land of the Viturians: From the lower part of the stream, which rises from the spring on Mannicelus, at the river Edus – there a boundary stone stands. Thence by the river up to the river Lemuris. Thence up the river Lemuris all the way to the stream Comberanea … Of public land that the Langenses possess the boundaries appear to be as follows … Thence straight up the ridge on the mountain Lemurinus: there a boundary stone stands in front of a hollow. (ILS 5946, ll. 6–7, 13, 15–16)
Figure 1, by contrast, is the most elementary representation of a cadastral grid among the repertoire of illustrations in the manuscripts of the Roman land-surveying manuals. It is wholly artifice; it is pure abstraction.
The locus of knowledge
Legal decisions like that of the Minucii in respect of the dispute between the Genoans and Viturians create legal facts whose relationship to social reality is potentially precarious, all the more so when they were codified in representations of such palpable epistatic distance from the material realities they claimed to regulate. How was the relationship between the form and content of the sovereign’s knowledge and the messy stuff of social relations not simply sustained, but exploited, so as to reinforce the sovereign’s legitimacy?
Several answers to this question are possible. At this juncture, I focus on one, namely, the care taken by Roman authorities to situate authoritative sources of knowledge – meaning, in this case, records of dispute resolution, archives of property holdings, as well as cadasters – in some broader topography of power. Roman knowledge was sought in those built environments wherein Rome situated the depersonalized institutions that instantiated sovereign power in provincial landscapes. These existed perforce at some physical distance from their objects of governance. The transmission of knowledge and power over the distance between the locus of Roman institutions and the objects of their regulation – rendering it efficacious on the ground, as it were – also required its translation, by means and mediation of procedures and authorities with powers of both interpretation and application. …
Drawing empire
My story might simply have ended in the permanent existence of parallel worlds, one of sovereign abstractions recorded in the metropole, and the other of local narratives resulting from what the Romans called a demonstratio finium, a walking of the boundaries. But in this case as in others, imperatives toward abstraction in pursuit of aggregation and power clashed with tendencies toward empiricism and the world, and the result in respect of cartography was the birth of a mode of map-making that integrated highly distinctive modes of representation. Allow me to illustrate.
With the most basic form of a Roman cadastral grid in mind (Figure 1), a brief survey of maps reproduced in the manuscripts of the Roman landsurveyors reveals that these could, in various ways, combine schematic, iconographic and figurative forms of representation within a single frame. Figure 2, for example, is a drawing of an ideal-typical city and its hinterland: an icon for a city is overlaid on a schema of a cadastral grid. Similarly, in figure 3, an icon for a city is situated somewhat problematically adjacent to the intersection of kardo and decumanus maximus, with an icon for a river iconically disturbing the schema of the grid.
Figure 4 presents a bird’s eye view of Minturnae. The irregular shape of the city wall is, I suspect, an attempt at a figurative rendering of the city itself. Alongside, on the left of the image, sit icons for built interventions in the periurban landscape, without, I observe, any attempt to render the residential suburbium, while on the right is a schema of the cadastral grid. Figure; icon; schema. …
… [Such examples offer] representation claiming at once knowledge of, and power over, the lands and peoples that were administratively subordinated to the Roman city … an abstract schema and system of number is overlaid on the world, whose messiness … is visible through the grid.
6. Conclusion
I offer three reflections, one about the history of law, as well as the history that the law tells itself; one about government; and one about sovereignty and empire.
At the close of the Roman Republic, two centuries after the creation of Rome’s first province from the island of Sicily, the Roman state in peninsular Italy comprised newly enfranchised communities of aliens, as well as communities of citizens incorporated as municipalities at considerable remove from Rome. This was at least partially the result of incremental change, but it resulted, too, from the revolutionary outcome of the so-called Social War, fought between Rome and its “allies” – its socii, hence, ultimately, the name, bellum sociale – between 90–88 BCE. Rome’s allies, who were alien in respect of Rome in both public and private law, had grown increasingly angry that the fruits of the empire that they had helped to win were asymmetrically distributed, as was control over what was effectively a unified foreign policy. Contemporaneous evidence is lacking, but in later representations, they demanded either an end to the alliance or full enfranchisement in the Roman state. Rome chose war, but in a sequence of events too complex for quick narration and too tragic for summary, after spectacular bloodshed, it conceded as victor what it had declined to grant as hegemon. Overnight, as a matter of legal fact, the formerly alien city-states of Italy were re-created as Roman municipalities; and their citizens became Roman citizens.
It is often theorized that Rome in this period observed a rule of personality in choice of law. To the extent that this was true, the communities of Italy henceforth being communities of Roman citizens, the citizens of these localities should have observed Roman private law – ius civile, Roman citizen’s law – in their social and economic relations. Nevertheless, in both ancient sources and modern scholarship, what is stressed is the operation of a newly-discovered public law doctrine of municipal autonomy, according to which (it is averred), the residents of municipalities, though they were Roman citizens, might largely craft a local private law for themselves. At a substantive level, it must be confessed that we have nearly no idea what effect this had. (Despite the place the doctrine occupies in ancient ideology and modern histories of Roman public law, no meaningful content whatsoever is ever attributed to any body of municipal private law anywhere in the empire over the entirety of its history.) As a practical matter, the concession of autonomy must be an expression of the limits of state infrastructrural power and likewise of the limits of the technologies of communication. Direct governance and true integration were simply impossible.
The doctrine of municipal autonomy is also an expression of the history of many such communities, that they were once alien and had become Roman overnight by statutory enactment. The suddenness and violence of their transformation required that means be crafted to allow for the continuing legality of pre-Roman (which is to say, non-Roman) forms of contract and social relations. The diversity of the world in the aftermath of the grant of citizenship was thus explained at a normative level as arising from local autonomy, but as an historical matter, it was a product of empire and ultimately war – a war that the Romans had largely lost, else the aliens would not have acquired citizenship and citizen privilege. “Local autonomy” thus became a normative principle in the civil law tradition as the result of its use as a fig-leaf: it explained the world as it was, in a fashion that evoked, but did not name, a past they could not speak.
Regarding government, I suggest the Romans came to conceive of the empire as a bounded and unified political space not in consequence of military action, or the exercise of force or even mere hegemony. It was, rather, the exercise of fiscal power and the extension of jurisdiction – the governance of populations and mapping of territory and the elaboration of state infrastructural power at a domestic level – that brought that understanding into being. …
About sovereignty and empire, my argument might be summarized as follows. Empire as both concept and form was not an a priori unity later broken down into subunits called “provinces”; it was constructed a posteriori from them. The province was the laboratory for which the Romans first crafted both language and institutions that imagined – and later enacted – the extension of state authority uniformly throughout a territory and down through its population. (Of course, local consent to the normative power of metropolitan language and legislation was a principal means by which the successful extension of state authority was in practice secured.) Finally, the repatriation of such concepts and language for use in the governing of Italy should be set alongside the history of institutions as diverse as the prefecture, the concept of maiestas, and perhaps cognitio as a form of civil procedure: each amounted to the domestication of technologies of power first exercised over subjects in the context of empire, henceforth to be deployed in the management of citizens in a notional republic. [END]
The Source:
Clifford Ando, ‘Hannibal’s Legacy: Sovereignty and Territoriality in Republican Rome’ in Empire, Hegemony or Anarchy? Rome and Italy, 201–31 BCE, edited by Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, Sema Karataş and Roman Roth, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2019
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