Serena
CONNOLLY
Writing a History from Below: The Evidence of the Codex
Hermogenianus
The
Codex Hermogenianus (CH), a Diocletianic
collection of 922 answers to petitions (rescripts)
written in the name of the emperors is partially
preserved in edited form in the Codex Justinianus
and other collections. I
show how the rescripts in the CH, though
overlooked by historians, can provide insightful evidence
of the activities and legal concerns of non-elite people,
evidence that is incomparable outside Egypt.
My examination of the status and location of the petitioners
in the CH gives the most detailed analysis
heretofore offered of the social groups that petitioned
and the process they used to do so.
The results of my analysis show that the petitionersí
names offer valuable data that are time and
place-specific to onomastics experts, who have hitherto
used only inscriptions as their source material.
Looking at the status of the petitioners, I have found that
they were astonishingly diverse: there are no entries to
senators, and only nine entries are obviously to members
of the curial class. The
rest are to non-elite individuals.
While most rescripts were to male civilians, a number were to
members of other unexpected social groups.
There were rescripts to soldiers, but far fewer than Brian
Campbell (1984) has found for an earlier period.
Rescripts to women number 29% of the total; they concern
non-familial more often than familial issues, and offer
insights into the activities and concerns of non-elite
women, about whom little is known from other types of
evidence. Slaves
are the most unexpected petitioners in the CH, and
their rescripts offer our most direct evidence for slaves
using law. Rescripts
to groups are addressed not to communities, but rather to
families. This
discovery calls into question the exemplarity of
rescripts to communities such as that at Skaptopara
(CIL 3.12336), which are preserved in inscriptions
and have until now been one of our fullest sources of
information for the rescript system.
I use the CH as a tool for understanding how the
rescript system functioned and can now add details and
corrections to existing schemata.
I describe how petitions were written using notariesí
services. From my
calculation of the number and frequency of the answers to
those petitions, I propose not only that Diocletian did
not reply to petitions, but also that the magister a
libellis, Hermogenian, who did compose the answers,
had helpers. My
proposition casts doubt on strongly-held assertions about
the relative involvement of emperors and magistri
in the rescript system. This
reconstruction of the rescript system on the basis of the
CH shows that the administration of the late Roman
Empire was a more collaborative enterprise than social
historians have previously proposed.