Electoral Rules from Baetica: Central and Local Legislation

It is commonly accepted that local statutes of cities of the Roman Empire embedded parts of Roman legislation. However, it is not easy to identify the legislative models on which local charters were tailored, and thus to assess to what extent local statutes relied on examples provided by laws of Rome. Starting from the outcomes of my previous investigation on anti-bribery provisions contained in juridical inscriptions from Roman Spain, the proposed project aims to provide a better understanding of the process by which pieces of already existing legislation of Rome came to be used in composing local laws and charters. For this purpose I will use as basic evidence the electoral provisions found in inscriptions from the Roman province of Baetica, given the fact that the relevant evidence from that region is particularly rich and detailed. The study will thus identify and gather the electoral measures contained in the selected evidence; subsequently, after a comprehensive and integrated presentation of all the evidence hailing from Baetica on electoral matters, the collected data will be studied in the light of the electoral legislation in force in Rome herself as well as in Roman communities of Italy. In this respect, both epigraphic evidence from cities in Italy and literary texts concerning the electoral institutions in Rome will be used as input for my research. Taking into account the heterogeneous nature of the evidence under analysis, the research will take on an interdisciplinary approach: inscriptions (of both juridical and honorary nature) as well as literary sources (historiographical traditions and juridical texts) will be analyzed from both a historical and a historical-juridical perspective. From a historical-juridical point of view, the results of the proposed research will contribute to the current scholarly debate about the legislative sources of the norms contained in municipal and colonial charters, being a model study based on a specific kind of evidence (namely, the reception of Roman electoral laws at a local level). From a historical perspective, the investigation will lead to a better comprehension of how the central power regulated the access to local magistracies and the local expression of popular will by means of electoral laws. The results of the research will be put together in a monograph, which, at its turn, will be meant to be the first step of a wider investigation dedicated to the collection and subsequent study of electoral rules and norms attested in epigraphical documents from all the provinces of the Roman Empire.

For current studies on the administration of centers in the Roman Empire, municipal and colonial charters constitute an important source of information and provide a direct insight into the civic life of local communities. Expectedly, the evidence from Roman Italy is especially well documented. However, the epigraphic evidence from Roman Spain to be more precise from the province Baetica appears to be particularly rich in details, with the Lex Ursonensis and the Lex Flavia municipalis taking the pride of place. As an essential aspect of public life in colonies and municipia, local electoral rules have been subject to particular attention. However, in studying this kind of evidence one cannot help noticing a gap in the current scholarly treatment of this issue: before the present research, a comprehensive and integrated account of all the electoral norms that can be found in both juridical and non-juridical evidence from Roman Spain was still missing. Indeed, whereas there exist some investigations concerning specific aspects of electoral consultation, and in addition some detailed descriptions of how the whole electoral process worked at a local level, no study has put forth so far that collected all the electoral measures contained in the complete statutes and the fragmentary inscriptions from Roman Spain in a comprehensive and integrated view. Moreover, and on a more generic level, it was not clear how pieces of Roman electoral legislation (intended both as entire laws and excerpts of norms) were absorbed in local charters. The scope of the proposed project was, accordingly, a double one: on the one hand, it aimed to provide a better understanding of the process by which pieces of already existing legislation of Rome came to be used in composing local laws and charters (by taking the electoral legislation as an example of this process); on the other hand, it aimed to clarify and to better explain numerous aspects of the electoral mechanisms of local communities of Roman Spain in the light of the parallel and analogue rules in force in Rome. After a comprehensive and integrated presentation of all the evidence hailing from Baetica on electoral matters, the collected data were studied in the light of the electoral legislation in force in Rome herself as well as in Roman communities of Italy (the latter so far being mostly neglected). From a historical-juridical point of view, the results of the proposed research will contribute to the current scholarly debate as to the legislative sources of the norms contained in municipal and colonial charters, by proposing the study of a specific model (namely, the reception of Roman electoral law at a local level). From a historical perspective, the investigation will better define how the central power regulated the access to local magistracies and the expression of popular will by means of electoral laws. The results of the research have been put together in a series of peer-reviewed and already published articles as well as in a monograph, which, at its turn, will be meant to be the first step of a wider investigation dedicated to the collection and subsequent study of electoral rules and norms attested in epigraphical documents from all the provinces of the Roman Empire.