What is a legal culture, and how do we understand and describe it? Historians have done a good job, over the past century, of describing legal institutions. They have been less successful at understanding legal cultures. Yet the eastern Roman Empire is suffused with attempts to articulate understandings of state power and capacity in the language of law. The current "institutional" approach does very little to explain why law was meaningful to subjects of empire: it merely attempts to explain "how it worked," hypothesizing that decent functioning incentivizes the use of the system. This is problematic: it relies anachronistically on a positivist understanding of law. Instead, law is shown to be implicated in multiple acts of community self-definition, in public rituals, and in popular consciousness. This raises the questions: why did legality play such an important role in the provincial imagination? And with what effects on the state itself?

Ulpian’s successors followed his lead in imagining a world without legal politics. To articulate their vision, they constructed a law of government: a body of law devoted to the administration of cities, and to criminal punishment. It focused on questions of public order and administration, and sought to eliminate the scope of, if not the need for, collective participation. It was concerned to limit the jurisdiction of governors, who might become enmeshed in local political systems. Within this system, jurists reserved the capacity for affective judgment for emperors alone. This is the vision of law that would be taken up over the long course of Late Antiquity: only the emperor would be permitted affect and discretion; all others were construed as responsible to the law itself. Together, jurists and the emperors created a vision of law that was radically opposed to the society upon which it was enacted.

The expansion of the Roman Empire into the Mediterranean in the early second century BCE represented a gradual diminution of the independence and autonomy of the Greek cities. At the same time, processes internal to the poleis were moving them in a more elitist direction, as the “big benefactors,” ultrawealthy men who bestowed ever-greater favors on their cities, moved toward monopolizing participation in civic magistracies. The council and other political bodies became off-limits to citizens who were not among the euergetistic elite. Still, democratic institutions and ideas of the previous period persisted, especially in the popular assembly. Christianity, the centralization of administrative power in the Roman Empire under Constantine, and various crises combined to deprive the cities of the last vestiges of dēmokratia in the fourth century CE, when popular assemblies largely disappear from the poleis.

This chapter emphasizes the growth and consolidation of democratic regimes across the ancient Greek world beginning in the fourth century BCE. The conquests of Alexander the Great and the policies of his successors did not spell the death of ancient Greek democracies but instead may have actually increased their number. Highly participatory institutions, including assemblies, magistracies, and law courts, can be found across the Mediterranean and beyond. Democracies shared best practices in this period on how to fend off tyranny, oligarchy, excessive demagoguery, and other threats to the democratic constitution. Festivals, monumental art, religious cult, and coinage contributed to a specifically democratic culture. At the same time, democracies settled on a general paradigm in which citizen women, while enjoying certain civic privileges, were excluded from political decision-making; democratic stability also depended on the presence of an enslaved class.

This chapter introduces the reader to the political environment of Archaic Greece (seventh through early fifth centuries BCE) on the eve of the emergence of the first democracies. Archaic city-states had already taken important steps combatting tyranny, working toward the rule of law, and providing outlets for popular participation. The first instances of dēmokratia in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE represented both an expansion of these tendencies and a revolutionary shattering of the status quo. Poets and intellectuals of the time register democracy’s radical empowerment of lower-class male citizens. Oligarchy or the rule of the wealthy few begins to emerge as a reactionary, countervailing constitutional force.