Public Law

Sources

Offenses. Public law comprised both the bulk of Roman “criminal” law and the rules that structured the government. The criminal offenses were few in number and many of them were “political” insofar as they were connected to the operations of the government. Two different offenses (perduellio, maiestas) are conventionally translated as “treason.” Neither, however, focuses on direct betrayal to a military enemy. They extend to usurpation of government authority, exceeding one’s own authority in public office, and, in a few extreme cases, military incompetence. Bribing voters and other forms of electoral corruption were prosecuted as ambitus. Vis, literally “force,” was prosecutable as a public offense under the Republic only when it involved seditious violence. Under the Empire, the definition of the crime was expanded to include purely private violence. Repetundae is generally described as “extortion” but was only a crime in limited circumstances. It originally covered provincial governors who took money from their subjects and was later extended to a variety of public officials who demanded or took bribes. The other public offenses were various forms of homicide, forgery of coinage or wills, theft of state property, and (under the Empire) adultery and interfering with the state grain supply.

Penalties. For most offenses the punishment was set by law, and so there was no need for a separate penalty phase of the trial. One exception was repetundae. The defendant was required to repay a multiple of the amount of money extorted, so a second hearing was held to determine the precise amount. Under the Republic there was some attempt to make punishments fit the specific offenses in kind, not just in severity. Those guilty of repetundae had to pay back money; those who committed ambitus were prohibited from holding office. Several offenses, including homicide, carried a “capital” penalty. In practice, however, the guilty party was allowed to go into exile, stripped of his citizenship, and prohibited from return on pain of actual execution. Only those guilty of the murder of a family member were actually killed; such a “parricide” was sewn into a sack with a snake, a dog, a rooster, and a monkey, then thrown into the sea as part of a ritual purification. Imperial punishments were not so closely tied to individual crimes: fines, floggings, internal exile, loss of rank, actual execution. Members of the upper classes remained exempt from corporal punishment, even as it came to be used for the bulk of the population. Criminals at all periods might be detained before trial or execution of their sentence, but imprisonment was never a punishment in its own right.

Sources

John Anthony Crook, Law and Life of Rome (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967).

Andrew M. Riggsby, Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

O. F. Robinson, The Criminal Law of Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).