This chapter discusses the emergence of the rescript system – a paradigm in which emperors used correspondence to settle legal questions – over the second century CE. This paradigm is most closely linked with the emperor Hadrian, and I consider three major legal innovations from Hadrian’s reign: Hadrian replacing the annually renewed Praetor’s Edict with a Perpetual Edict under more formal imperial control, Hadrian sunsetting the “right of response” which had formerly been given to individual jurists, and Hadrian’s vast expansion of the imperial bureaucracy and correspondence system. I then consider how imperial legal replies, or “rescripts,” could represent imperial sovereignty in a variety of different modes, from the collaborative and deliberative style of the Diui Fratres to the more bureaucratic and concise mode visible in documents like P.Col.123.

I conclude the book by discussing how later historians used Roman law to imagine legal orders that were more appealing than their own conditions. I use two examples: Bracton, whose treatise on English law used Roman concepts to aggrandize jurists like himself within the legal system of the thirteenth century, and Fritz Schulz, a refugee from Nazi Germany whose writings imagined a Roman rule of law as an implicit counterpoint to the totalitarianism he had fled. I finally argue that this rhetorical feature of Roman law is not unique to the Roman context, but instead reflects a broader aspirational tendency in legal writing and historiography.

This chapter discusses the role of law in the representational program of the emperor Augustus. First I consider a poem by Horace, in which Horace argues with the jurist Trebatius Testa about his potential liability for defamation, before claiming that the new emperor will protect him from legal judgments. I suggest that Horace casts Augustan order as superseding legal rules, but that he offers a language for imagining imperial judgment as better, or fairer, than law. I next discuss a coin that commemorates Augustus restoring leges et iura to the Roman people, and argue that this coin should be read in connection with an edict recorded in Cassius Dio that voided all illegal actions taken during the triumviral period. I then discuss the story of Vedius Pollio, an enslaver whose plan to feed a slave to lampreys was foiled by Augustus, and show how this story can be read as a justificatory folktale for imperial control over enslavement practice and for expanding imperial jurisidiction more broadly. I finally discuss the interplay between Augustus’ marriage legislation, with its extreme penalties for adultery, and his own punishment of his adulterous daughter Julia.

John Malalas had access to an expanded version of the chronicle of Eusebius, which included also a different Christian era (probably AM 5967). Most of the fragments cannot be traced back to Eusebius, and add material drawn from other works of Eusebius, Latin literature and from the Book of Jubilees.

This book began with a set of propositions about how the ancient Greek religious system worked, particularly in relation to divine manifestation. I set out to explore how technology featured and functioned with(in) those propositions which mediated between human and supernatural realms. Including the mechanical in the discourse on divine epiphany and religious experience is not intuitive. Karel Čapek’s satiric vision of a machine that creates practically free energy but spurts out a numinous by-product known as the Absolute is both very relevant and utterly alien to the ancient context. It is alien in that Čapek’s novel is focalised through (relatively) modern preconceptions of technology and religion as antithetical. The protagonist’s invention is strictly a machine of science fiction. That a sense of the numinous might be created by mechanical technology is entertained in the story as imaginatively (and metaphorically) compelling but remains impossible in practical terms.