Reform and Legislation in the Roman Empire

• Autores: Boudewijn Sirks
• Localización: Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Antiquité, ISSN 0223-5102, Vol. 125, Nº. 2, 2013
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • Reformare means bringing something into a new or previous form, or change its nature. Here this is restricted to bringing about changes in social behaviour (social engineering). Social structures in Roman Antiquity must have been firm and consequently social rules too, but they were nevertheless subject to some change over the centuries. Further, legislation was, in Roman Antiquity, generally not used to introduce innovations. In the Republic there are therefore very few cases of such reforms, and these are all cases of the law as a last resort to maintain vanishing social rules by enforcing them. In the Empire the situation was not so much different. Yet, there are, in this period, more cases to be found in which a legal measure had a certain social impact and where a social change generated a legal response in order to counteract the undesired consequences. Though not spectacular, compared to the general stability of the social structures they are not negligeable.