The relationship between the region which would become Illyricum and Rome, especially the legal position and status of the region in the later Roman Republic, is not entirely clear due to inadequate sources. It is often assumed by modern scholarship that Illyricum was either a province with ‘vague boundaries’, being outside a provincial zone as an independent protectorate, or administered from other provinces. Wilkes denied the existence of any meaningful regional policy in this period after the potentially dangerous Macedonian kingdom had been destroyed. Future Illyricum is represented as a strategic backwater where Romans fought only to train armies and provide triumphs for the imperatores, a place from which Romans were actually in retreat in the second and early first century BC. Most recently, in an extensive discussion of the sources, Šašel Kos summarised Roman Republican political conduct in the region until Octavian as an ad hoc reaction to the regional crisis. There was no meaningful, systematic conquest; the Romans were gradually establishing their direct and indirect control over parts of the region, as a consequence of their military interventions.

The trans-Adriatic conduct of Rome from the Illyrian wars to Caesar's pro-consulship recognised two different, but interrelated, zones in the eastern Adriatic. Thus, two contrasting Roman approaches to foreign affairs emerged: expansionism and hegemonism overlapped and complemented each other.

Readers of Roman history in early modern Europe showered praise on the timeless universality of Tacitus' wisdom: 'In iudgement there is none sounder, for instruction of life, for al times', wrote the author of the English translation of the Annals and Germania. But students of Tacitus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also believed that his writings communed directly with their own present; that Tacitus revealed political truths to all ages, but most especially 'to these our times'. Tacitus had been largely forgotten or overlooked in the medieval and early Renaissance periods, and, despite the print publication of his works in various editions from the 1470s, his relative obscurity persisted in the sixteenth century. The magisterial editions of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) from 1574 to 1607, however, anticipated a change in scholarly and political culture in the later sixteenth century, when Tacitus enjoyed an overwhelming and unprecedented popularity. Between 1600 and 1649 at least sixty-seven editions of the Annals and Histories were printed. The major works were translated into various vernacular languages, widening the readership of an author whose prose was deemed difficult even in a Latinate culture. Writers modelled the style, content and structure of their own histories on Tacitus, whilst the Annals in particular supplied dramatists with the most lurid of plots to realise on the stage.

The dates at which each of Tacitus' works was published is not known for certain, but it is generally accepted that they were written and published in a period of roughly twenty years, beginning in 98 (the year after his consulship) and in the order opera minora ('lesser works': Agricola, Germania, Dialogus), Histories, Annals . Though Tacitus was well known in his lifetime as a public figure, the prophecy of his friend, Pliny the Younger, that his histories would be immortal (Ep. 7.33.1) seemed unlikely to be fulfilled, for Tacitus was never a popular author, and during the next four centuries there are only a few references to him by name and an even smaller number of quotations from him. According to a statement in the fourth-century Historia Augusta the emperor Tacitus (275-6) ordered that copies of all Tacitus' works were to be made and placed in public libraries. Though that statement may not be literally true, a germ of truth may lie behind it, namely, that at that time works of Tacitus were scarce and hard to come by. The only significant sign of a Tacitean influence in this period is that the late fourth-century historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek by birth, but writing in a highly individualised Latin style, proclaimed that his work continued the narrative of events from where Tacitus had left off. However, one statement from late antiquity is of importance for the manuscript tradition.

Scholars in the early decades of the twentieth century were responsible for ethnographically oriented studies that invalidated much of the preceding, mostly nineteenth-century, scholarship. Tacitus, particularly in the first half of the Germania, is guided as much by ethnographical commonplaces and generalisations as by any individual or empirically derived autopsy. As Syme succinctly put it, 'If Cornelius Tacitus was ever on the Rhine, he discloses no sign of it in the Germania'. Sources were available, from Posidonius to Caesar, to Pliny's Bella Germaniae (and the Naturalis Historia as well), to Aufidius Bassus' Bellum Germanicum. Information could have been had from returning merchants and soldiers, as was the case with Pliny. But Tacitus does not tell us much on any of this. Rives, following Lund, is surely right: 'although the work does contain a few verifiable observations, it is so shaped by ethnographic preconceptions as to be virtually unusable as a historical source'. Hence the somewhat hostile reaction of Syme. Rives himself mitigates Lund's historiographically bleak assessment, looking in particular to archaeological and other records, and suggesting that use of Tacitus involves 'careful evaluation and a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty'. But the fact remains that the Germania is far from reliable as a historical, anthropological or sociological work, however important it has been in the realm of reception. So the question remains as to what precisely the Germania is trying to be or do. There is also the question of how we are to read it.

Only two ancient historians, Tacitus and Thucydides, have had a direct and enduring influence on how modern historians understand and write history. While Tacitus does not enjoy the status of Thucydides as required reading still in philosophy and politics courses, his influence is clearly evident on the two greatest historians of imperial Rome, Edward Gibbon and Sir Ronald Syme. Indeed, it is this triumvirate of an ancient, early modern and modern historian that is responsible for the prevalent pessimistic view that, for all its achievements in so many realms, Rome under the emperors was an environment of ambition, deceit and violence. Syme (1903-89) was a New Zealander but from the age of twenty-two Oxford was his home, first as an undergraduate at Oriel College (1925-7), then from 1929 as Fellow of Trinity College. He moved to Brasenose College in 1949 when elected Camden Professor of Ancient History, was knighted in 1959 and, upon his retirement in 1970, was elected a Fellow of Wolfson College. In 1976 he was appointed to the Order of Merit, one of the highest honours bestowed by the monarch in the United Kingdom and restricted to twenty-four members at any one time. The author of more than a dozen scholarly books and over two hundred articles and essays on the history, historiography and prosopography of Rome, Syme, along with Theodor Mommsen, is generally recognised as one of the two greatest Roman historians of the modern era.

ATHENS' AMNESTY AND LAW'S ALĒTHEIA

Forensic oratory, as Aristotle notes, is oriented toward the past. The law can try only events that have already happened. The speaker of Isocrates 20 bemoans this limitation. It would be best, he says, if criminals bore some mark (sēmeion) that enabled us to punish them before they committed their crime, “inasmuch as it is better to find a means of averting future problems than to punish those that have already occurred” (12). As it is, one should consider it a windfall when a criminal does come before the court, and punish him before he does something worse (12–14). Inherently retrospective, dikē is associated in Greek thought with memory. Zeus “does not overlook (or “forget,” lēthei) that sort of justice that a city holds in it,” says Hesiod (Erga 268–69). The avenging spirit of the murder victim, a demonic agent of justice, is called the alastōr, literally the “unforgetting one.”

Athenian law is a notorious historical dead end. Unsystematic, with no formal legal theory, no unified lawcode, no written verdicts or system of precedent, it falls off the map of Western jurisprudential history, whether common law or civil. Both as forensic practice and as jurisprudential philosophy it is “before the law” as we know it, an evolutionary oddity. The subject of this book is neither the practice nor the philosophy of Athenian law, but something between the two, the juridical discourse generated by and embedded in the courtroom speeches of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. These texts, as I hope to show, offer complex (though not necessarily coherent) meditations on law and justice. They create and sustain a juridical world-view and a juridical world, a world not completely segregated from its surrounding cultural environment, of course, but recognizably distinct in its rules, logic, and structure. While Athens' legal practice may be deemed an irrelevant detour on the path of jurisprudential history, Athenian legal discourse, I suggest, is an important part of that history, offering an early example of a developed, if unsystematic and largely latent, body of jurisprudential thought and a self-consciously juridical relation to life.

This book is not a quest for origins although, as Derrida has remarked, that is one temptation created by the law's apparent resistance to history. Instead it is the archaeology of a neglected site of legal knowledge.

LAW, CODE

Modern jurisprudence is characterized by an ideal of systematicity: it aims at (even if it necessarily fails to achieve) completeness, unity, consistency, and stability. Since the compilation of the Justinian Corpus Iuris Civilis in sixth-century ce Rome, these goals have been attached to the idea of a written code, and a written code has in turn been seen as the essence of the law. The commitment to codification has been particularly strong in the civil law tradition that traces its origins to the Corpus Iuris Civilis, but common law, too, is predicated on the notion of a legal code, though one that takes the form not of a single authoritative text but of a historical accretion of decisions in individual cases.

NARRATIVE OF A FAMILY TREE

If in the amnesty cases juridical discourse masters civic time through legal memory, in inheritance cases it controls biological time via familial succession. Through the contested movement of property, inheritance law links the present generation to its dead ancestors and future heirs. In these cases, the law constructs and reproduces a normative family structure. In the process it also reproduces itself, projecting itself into both the past and the future. Inheritance cases are thus about genealogy in two different senses: they record the legitimate reproduction of the genos and at the same time write a history of the law.

This book charts a legal cosmogony. It studies the creation of a juridical cosmos in the courtroom speeches of classical Athens. This cosmos, as its Greek etymology implies, is both orderly and ornamented. On the one hand, it is a legal order: not just an arrangement of laws or an organization of behavior into categories of legality and illegality, but a discursive order that is shaped by, even as it gives shape to, the concept of “law.” It describes a legal world and a legal world-view: a specifically juridical way of thinking, speaking, and being. On the other hand, this cosmos is an aesthetic order, the product of the creative arrangements and expressive strategies of forensic rhetoric. In Athens' juridical cosmos, legal and aesthetic order are inseparable. What the texts say about the law is a function of how they say it. The tropes of forensic oratory themselves constitute a mode of jurisprudential thought.

This book traces the outlines of this juridical cosmos in the texts of the Attic orators. It examines the strategies by which forensic oratory authorizes this world; the metaphysics of causality and probability that govern it; where it draws the boundaries of legality and how it secures them.