Aeschines and Demosthenes saw Athenian legal documents as the physical consequences of human suspicion, and treated them accordingly. In striking contrast, it was at first rare (although not unknown) for a breath of suspicion to touch a Roman legal document, as it was at first rare (although eventually much better known) for suspicion of corruption to touch the Romans themselves. In legal and financial transactions, the Romans were considered astonishingly trustworthy, at least by a Greek observer. As Polybius in the second century BC said, with some admiration, “Among the Greeks, public men, if entrusted with a single talent, though protected by ten copyists, as many seals, and twice as many witnesses, cannot keep faith; but among the Romans, in their magistracies and embassies, men having the handling of a great amount of money do what is right because of the trust pledged by their oath.” Documents (with officials, seals, and witnesses) could not prevent Greek misbehavior, but were not even mentioned in an assessment of Roman good behavior, where the absolute quality of Roman fides struck the observer first. Yet at Rome these documents existed. Their uses there were different, for they were generated for entirely different purposes and through an entirely different, complex, and formal process. What they were was very important: attention was paid to their physical appearance (this chapter), and their style – form and phrasing – was notably different from that of any comparable Greek documents, as well as from everyday Latin (chapter 3).

In their various aspects and associations, Roman tablets can be seen to share a number of characteristics. This perceived resemblance can be reinforced and extended by an examination of the Latin written on these tablets, for all writing on tablets shares three unusual traits that separate it off from everyday Latin. First, its style and syntax are not those of the everyday: they correspond much more closely to the style and syntax of what philosophers of language call “formalized” language. The definition of this “voice of traditional authority” arrived at by the anthropologist Maurice Bloch is most applicable here: such language is an “impoverished language” in which “choice of form, of style, of words and of syntax is less than in ordinary language” – by consciously following certain patterns, others are excluded. Second, this formulaic language was recognized as archaic or archaizing, its set forms (and spellings) redolent of the past but modifiable through general agreement or for particular circumstances as long as that old-time flavor was retained. Finally, all writing on tablets shared components that went by the same names, formula, ordo, and nomen, and was characteristically subject to extensive abbreviation and parody.

Recitation from tablets was a distinctive and authoritative form of reading, as tablets themselves were a distinctive and authoritative form of writing. As was clear from the descriptions of prayers and curses, the contexts of recitation could be very distinctive too – complex, detailed, and ceremonial. Such was also true of a number of different acts not yet examined in detail, like the taking of the census, or the making of treaties, laws, and vows and dedications. All of these intricate ceremonial acts, interesting in themselves and for the way tablets are recited in them, also point to the most important aspect of tablets, that they were not merely used or useful but were considered to have an active role in establishing or changing something about the world, be it the composition of the citizen body or relations between states, men, or men and the supernatural: tablets, as will be seen, could be involved in the creation of, as well as embodiments of, a new, newly fixed reality. What these ceremonies were to achieve, their tablets were seen also to achieve, and this is the final characteristic that identifies tablets as members of the same family.

Greek legal documents provide an important contrast – in language, treatment, and consequence – to Roman legal documents, for in the Greek world, what can be known about the wording and style of legal documents, as well as what can be known about attitudes towards them, underlines their ambiguous status and lack of independent legal authority. The evidence is mixed and uneven: for classical Athens, legal documents themselves do not survive, and are instead only referred to by fourth-century orators, while for the later Hellenistic world, especially Ptolemaic Egypt, the legal documents themselves exist, but in no descriptive context that allows a direct understanding of their value and relationship to their legal act. This has left considerable room for scholarly disagreement over how Hellenistic documents in particular were conceived and valued. Only relatively recently has a consensus over the legal strengths and, especially, weaknesses of these documents been forged, led by J.-P. Lévy and H.-J. Wolff. What is written here adds to what has already been done by giving particular emphasis to what is known about the generation of these documents, what can be deduced from the wording of the documents themselves, and what can be hypothesized from social attitudes about documents when these are known, components specifically chosen because of the contrast they will provide to a discussion of the same components in Roman documents on tablets that follows.

The Roman ceremonial acts described in Part I, those unitary acts legal and otherwise that with the help of tablets reshaped and fixed human veritas, were deeply rooted in a wider world of belief, their efficacy an entrenched part of Roman tradition. Yet the world around ceremony changed in the late Republic and empire: as Rome's dominion, so too the number of Roman citizens increased. In their actions and observations these new citizens both asserted the traditionalism of ceremony and changed it, relied upon it and questioned it, maintained it and undermined it. Pressures of time and space had already caused some delicate queries about the efficacy of traditional ceremony, as Cicero's investigation of the census in the first century BC had shown. But conservative adjustments, like those of language (concepta verba for certa), kept these ceremonial acts usable, while praetorian endorsements of informal legal acts (like consensual rather than stipulatory contracts) kept these formal acts distinct, and juristic commentary preserved both useability and distinctiveness. Such adjustment and parallel development allowed Rome's expansion into world empire to stretch or multiply many traditional Roman institutions, and permitted Romans of the late Republic and empire to adapt and assert, rather than lose, some fundamental sense of what it meant to be Roman in a rapidly changing world.

In Roman legal affairs and other ceremonial acts with public implications, writing on wooden, wax, or bronze tablets was special and preferred. To Greeks, on the other hand, tablets were not particularly special, and they often chose papyrus for such acts. This was a distinction with a real difference. For the Romans, the form conveyed several fundamental messages. As a necessary part of a ceremonial act, a tablet could come to embody, in a final and authoritative way, the substance of that act, but as part of such an act, it also helped to create the new reality that such an act aimed at establishing. These three related aspects – ceremonial, authoritative, and active – all characterize the traditional Roman understanding of the importance of words written on tablets in manipulating and fixing both visible and unseen realities.

By “ceremonial” (or “ritual”) I mean patterns of behavior that are standardized and repeatable, and that are performed in a far more distinctive and self-conscious way than those that can be deemed habitual. Performing one's “morning ritual,” for example, is merely habit for ninety-nine out of a hundred people.

Tabulae changed over time. Roman-law documents from the Roman provinces demonstrate close connections to Roman practice as it had developed in Italy in the first century AD, and through these connections, by the impact these documents have, and by the changes these documents themselves underwent, help to illuminate an administrative and legal dynamic in the complicated process of cultural change that characterized the first two-and-a-half centuries of the Roman empire. On these tabulae, and the behaviors and beliefs associated with them, there is perceptible influence from the center – not through laws or senatusconsulta, as had been the case with wills, but through authoritative example and Roman decisions taken for Roman reasons. This points to a mechanism of cultural change that is above all a mediated one, one in which – no matter what local practice a change may seem to mimic – the figure of the local Roman official or the distant emperor is the most important one, even as fides and formality continue to interleave and layer on the wood document. Social and legal hierarchies and the influence of their practices at the near-center, Campania, were visible but subtle and complicated, like a list of sealers from Pompeii; in the provinces, however, they are cruder and more obvious, and what appeared as smooth and subtle incremental evolutions in Roman legal tabulae in Campania as a consequence translate into much more jagged jumps and shifts in more distant parts of the Roman world.

The similar qualities attributed to tablets, their characteristic linguistic forms, and the parallel treatment accorded such forms all suggest that the underlying relationship the Romans themselves perceived, in calling these forms carmina, was no superficial one. Moreover, Roman tabulae not only displayed similarities. In the ceremonies with which they were associated, they were used in two similar, major ways, the subjects, respectively, of this chapter and the next: first, as templates for reading (itself performed in a distinct and powerful way, called recitatio), and second, as the objects created in association with, and embodying the result of, that ceremony. In these ceremonies, tablets were not just useful but both significant and active. Their language, described in chapter three, is thus not only “formalized” but approaches what philosophers of language (following J. L. Austin and J. R. Searle) call “performative”: “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.” Austin, Searle, and others have noted that defined circumstances (or “conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect”) must exist for words to have performative effect, and that these procedures must be executed correctly and completely. But the ways in which Roman tabulae are used demonstrate that, in this Roman context at least, performative language cannot be abstracted from physical form, and that agreed-upon ceremonial completed correctly must be understood as far more than just a necessary “precondition” that allows performative language to have its effect.

In China, in the nineteenth century, charms in the countryside invoking the help of the gods frequently employed the physical form and formulae of bureaucratic orders issued by the imperial government, complete with phrases used in official decrees and Chinese characters of command at the top, all written on yellow paper (the imperial color) in cinnibar ink (a red that signalled a decree's authenticity), and marked with an official seal. In a bureaucratic empire – very intensely governed, by Roman standards – it was efficacious to compel even the supernatural with the external forms utilized by the bureaucracy. The puzzle the Romans present is the reverse of this: in an empire with hardly any machinery of enforcement – a handful of officials, a minute bureaucracy, no real police – how could law have force? How can law have any power in the absence of the rule of law?

To be effective Roman law initially drew its authority from outside government and outside itself, from the wider world of belief in which it was embedded. Interpretations of early Roman law as in some way “magical” are therefore not as wrongheaded as their critics have thought. For magic and law travel the same road (indeed, a wide road, travelled also by religious and other acts), aim at many of the same ends, and use many of the same techniques.

As a result of the eruption of Vesuvius, over four hundred legal and financial tabulae dating between AD 15 and AD 79 have been preserved in the Campanian region of Italy. Over these sixty-four years, several important changes in both the physical form and the internal formulation of these tablets can be observed, changes that are part of the larger transformation of the tabula from the authoritative embodiment of a ceremonial act into the embodiment of an act that drew its authority not only from the process of its making but also from the people who made it. These changes fall along three interrelated trajectories. First, there was a change in physical form, from diptych to triptych, that occurred at a different time and a different rate for documents of different types of act, reflecting not only the traditional linkage of type of legal act, style of writing, and physical form but also the conservative qualities of tabulae distantly or closely associated with ceremonial, unitary acts. Second, as physical forms changed so too did at least some of the acts themselves, the traditional association of act and form reinforced by the way change in both form and content took place: as a third tablet was hinged to the original two, so too were different acts added to but not coalesced with the original one, creating a multi-part combinational act on a triptych.

A bestialized urban mob, whose enslavement to its appetites and desperate circumstances make it incapable of reason, is one of the stock characters of the Roman political drama scripted by ancient writers. The contempt in which the plebs was held even by one of its supposed former defenders, the ex-tribune, now historian Sallust, is illustrative: the plebeian masses, with nothing to lose, but much to gain from revolution and upheaval, are rash and treacherous, an enemy within, ready not just to sell their support to any power-seeker but even to plunder their fellow citizens. Cicero seems – at least in public – to take a less harsh view of the People's character as a political agent, though it is still often characterized by “rashness” (temeritas) and “fickleness” (levitas), and comparable to irrational forces of nature such as the sea or the winds, whose gusts give the populist politician his direction and power.

It is consistent with these conceptions of the multitude that the audiences of public meetings were frequently derided by Cicero, once out of earshot, as composed of imperiti, “ignoramuses,” an adjective that adheres to references to the plebs or multitudo virtually as a formula. The word imperitus, to be sure, refers in the first instance to ignorance and inexperience, not necessarily the lack of basic mental capacity; and in any case, Cicero on one occasion explicitly allows that even the imperitissimi who make up the audience at the contio are capable of distinguishing an ingratiating demagogue from a true friend of the People, and thus, with proper instruction, of apprehending the truth.

The first chapter introduced the central problems and themes of this book. It remains, however, to bring into sharper focus the phenomenon to be investigated. The Republican contio or public meeting had a well-defined place within a great complex of traditional political practices (Rome had no written constitution) and further took place in specific central locations in the city of Rome which, with their familiar monuments and historical associations, drew it into a symbolic context as well as a distinctive urban milieu. The chief purpose of this chapter is to sketch out these two contexts – one institutional and pragmatic, the other physical and symbolic – not merely to provide the necessary background for what is to come but also to invite reflection on the relationship between public deliberation, its material setting, and political practice. In the final part of this chapter I turn to a third kind of context, that of rhetorical theory, looking briefly at Cicero's explicit characterization of the nature of contional rhetoric, drawn partly from his essays on oratory, partly from incidental comments scattered elsewhere through his works. The main focus of attention in this book will be on actual practice and actual rhetoric as they are revealed by specimens of contional oratory and narratives of actual events; but the more theoretical descriptions collected at the end of this chapter will show what a contemporary master thought public speech was like – or, alternatively, should be like.

Roiled by waves of unrest in the last century of its life, the Roman Republic continually fell into bloody spasms of political violence. Economic distress, prolonged military service, controversies over land redistribution, exclusion from full civic participation, and the savage dispossessions of civil war made the Italian countryside a persistent breeding ground for discontent. The city of Rome, now housing in cramped, unsanitary conditions perhaps a million souls – an enormous population under pre-modern conditions – depended on the agricultural surplus of far-flung lands; its population hung perilously close to the brink of starvation and was apt to panic when poor harvests or disruption of the grain routes caused periodic interruptions in the food supply. Violence and persistent political disruption in the absence of effective institutions for maintaining order made the city ungovernable for extended periods in the 50s; three years in that decade opened without consuls because it had proven impossible to hold elections. The long-suffering soldiery saw its hopes for compensation upon demobilization persistently dashed by a recalcitrant Senate, and looked to its victorious generals to realize them by whatever methods would serve. It seems extraordinary not that the Roman Republic fell (if that is the right word) when it did, but that it survived so long.

Yet the traditional political system maintained the allegiance of its citizens right down at least to the Caesarian civil war, and arguably much further.