Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The law of Late Antiquity
- 2 Making the law
- 3 The construction of authority
- 4 The efficacy of law
- 5 In court
- 6 Crime and the problem of pain
- 7 Punishment
- 8 The corrupt judge
- 9 Dispute settlement I: out of court
- 10 Dispute settlement II: episcopalis audientia
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The law of Late Antiquity
- 2 Making the law
- 3 The construction of authority
- 4 The efficacy of law
- 5 In court
- 6 Crime and the problem of pain
- 7 Punishment
- 8 The corrupt judge
- 9 Dispute settlement I: out of court
- 10 Dispute settlement II: episcopalis audientia
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At no period in their history were the Romans known for leniency towards the condemned. Despite the wide availability of the right of appeal, access to it on the part of condemned criminals merely seeking to delay their inevitable punishment was severely restricted. Given the reputation of Late Antiquity for cruel and inhumane treatment of those on the wrong side of the law, we would expect evidence of increased ingenuity in the use of public punishment, especially of those condemned on a capital charge. However,as we have seen, the barbarous treatment of people imprisoned on remand and the subjection of the innocent to torture were both publicly questioned, and the high profile given, for various reasons, to judicial torture may signal, not necessarily a greater intensity of use but a profounder questioning, at least in some quarters, of the implications of the quaestio procedure. In the area of punishment, changes occurred in Late Antiquity which suggest that more humane values had a real impact, and the variety of public penalties, to which the guilty were liable decreased. At the same time, more is heard of arguments against the death penalty on theological grounds. The Christian insistence on greater humanity in punishment, within limits, is, as we shall see, representative of a society still conditioned to accept state cruelty and individual suffering, but also increasingly prone to exploit the rhetoric of pain to question and, where possible modify, the assumptions inherited from the Early Empire, on which Roman penal practice was based.
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- Law and Empire in Late Antiquity , pp. 135 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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