Provincial governance was never of great interest to Roman administrators or jurists. This begins to change only when jurists increasingly became administrators exposed to provincial claim. Jurists had to begin thinking about provincial contexts as raising important questions of governance - in particular, that key assumptions about law might be different in a world marked by extractive governance. Key among these is the late second/early third century jurist Ulpian of Tyre. Ulpian begins the process of transforming governance from an array of untheorized practices into something amenable to traditional juristic analysis. As a successful administrator, he did this knowing that such an account was otherwise lacking. His magnum opus, On the Office of the Proconsul, can be seen as an attempt to capture what was distinctly provincial about provincial governance. But Ulpian’s key text can also be read as a response to the challenge of provincial legalism.

Criminal punishment captured the imagination. It was a violent process, staged deliberately by the state to demonstrate certain truths about state power. However, these public scenes were susceptible to rewriting by provincial subjects. These subjects fixated on state attempts to define truth by means of judicial violence. Subjects insisted that violence be conditioned on its respect for provincial logos - rational discussions about the nature of any particular act of state violence. They emphasized that the courtroom (rather than the archive) was the most important locus for determining the content of laws and the boundaries of state power and insisted that the courtroom be a space not just for punishment, but communication. Most prolific on this point are early Christian writings about martyrs, which emphasized what they claimed was the Roman state’s incapacity to rationally defend the persecution of Christians. It is found among Jews and pagans as well.

This chapter turns to the elite reaction to broader provincial claims about legality. Rather than putting the courtroom at the center of their legal imaginary, Greek elites reimagined themselves as transcending normal administrative processes. Through their physical self-presentation, through their beautiful speech, and through their ability to create particular affective states in their interlocutors, they sought to achieve thauma: a state of amazement that obviated the need for legal judgment. The Greek rhetoric of the "Second Sophistic" is, on this reading, a sort of anti-legalism: by replacing legal judgment with aesthetic evaluation, elites attempted to preserve their positions - and their physical bodies - from degradation and punishment.

The Roman Empire was rooted in violent acts. The spread of Roman control over the provinces was a lengthy process, but one that fundamentally changed the nature of political relationships. Settlers extruded from Italy. Large amounts of wealth changed hands. Land tenure was reconfigured. The population was divided first into provinces, then into assize districts. Subject populations were registered, counted, and taxed. The process put immense amounts of strain on the internal structures of communities. Roman governors were tasked with administering this new political landscape, where their position was tenuous. They distrusted new local elites who, along with Roman settlers, were prone to take advantage of local people. These same people were also responsible for tax collection, which, along with keeping the peace, was the governor’s ultimate responsibility. This systemic tension opened a space for provincial legalism.

The bibliography on ancient Greek democracy is vast, although recent trends suggest it may have peaked, at least for now. What follows is necessarily selective. When it comes to overviews of ancient Greek politics and society, for scope, ambition, vivacity, and theoretical sophistication, it is difficult to top de Ste. Croix 1981, a towering life’s work. Everyone should read it, even if only to disagree with it. In a similar vein is Cartledge 2018, focused on democracy specifically. It reaches different conclusions from the ones offered here, in particular regarding the Hellenistic period, but is forceful and engaging. Meier 1990 remains excellent on Greek politics in general. Davies 1993 and O’Neil 1995 are overviews of ancient Greek democracy concentrating on the Classical period. Ma 2024 appeared only after the present manuscript was completed. While I have not been able to incorporate references to this impressive achievement throughout the text, the reader should be aware that it is one of the strongest arguments yet for seeing genuinely democratic practices down through the period of the high Empire (second century ce and beyond).

The Introduction justifies a new history of ancient Greek democracies based on the proliferation of new archaeological discoveries, advances in scholarship, and the need for an up-to-date synthesis. Democracy was not limited to Classical Athens (480–323 BCE) but spread throughout the Greek world over the fourth through second centuries BCE. Ancient Greek democracies represent a phenomenon specific to the historical and cultural context of the ancient Mediterranean, but they still have much to teach us today.

What can a premodern narrative of legal change teach us? This brief epilogue raises the more complex question of the totalizing ambitions of states that operate from the assumption that law is a specialized practice, rather than something that emerges from daily life. The existence of a black-letter law urges states towards legislation as legal utopianism: the attempt to remake subjects in an optimal fashion and to exclude those they find problematic. This tendency towards utopianism - a form of state magic - is present in both late antique and modern contexts. Understanding the roots of it urges us towards humility with respect to our own projects of legal transformation.

This chapter describes the rapid spread of democracy in the later fifth and earlier fourth centuries BCE. The reader imagines the life cycle of a democratic citizen in Classical Athens, from birth in the deme to political participation in mid-life to arbitration work in old age, with detours into the court system, festivals, the Athenian Funeral Oration, and ostracism. Comparative evidence is introduced from fourth-century BCE Argos. The Athenian monumental building projects of the period of the high empire (Parthenon, Propylaea, Erectheion, etc.) receive their own subsection, with a focus on democratic art. The reader is introduced properly to oligarchic institutions and ideology, which almost managed to reverse democratic gains for good in this period. The chapter ends with a discussion of the stasis or civil strife that broke out between democrats and oligarchs in so many Greek poleis.

This chapter takes up a series of popular folktales about radical inequality (Aesop, Gevia ben Psisa/ben Qosem) to argue that provincial communities become increasingly interested in reframing quotidian interactions as legal interactions. Legal dialogue came to be imagined as a register of discourse capable of controlling powerful people. Interestingly, however, all of these stories feature a protagonist somehow marked as physically deformed or otherwise grotesque: Aesop was the ugliest slave imaginable, Geviah a hunchback. The very bizarreness of these characters offers a standing challenge to normative understandings of power: in each case, it is the most degraded members of society who manage to wield legal logos to control their superiors, society’s notional elites.