New Light on the Roman Legal System: the Appointment of Judges

Abstract

In Spain in 1981, near Seville, there was a spectacular discovery. It allows us to see back to the reign of Domitian, third and last of the Flavian emperors (AD 81–96), and to recreate a vivid picture of the little local senate of Irni meeting in the very shadow of the municipality's newly acquired constitution. Ten bronze tablets, each nearly a metre wide and rather more than half a metre high, were fixed along the wall of its council-chamber, presumably at a level at which letters about half a centimetre high could be clearly read from ground level. Each rectangular tablet carried three columns of writing, each column about fifty lines, each line an average of about ten words. At five hundred words a column and thirty columns, the Statute of Irni— the lex Irnitana —was thus a massive document. The discovery in 1981, by people using metal detectors to search for coins, was of no less than six of the ten tablets. Later excavation discovered a few more fragments. The last tablet bears at its end the date 11th October, AD 91.