In this book, Andrew Riggsby offers a survey of the main areas of Roman law, both substantive and procedural, and how the legal world interacted with the rest of Roman life. Emphasizing basic concepts, he recounts its historical development and focuses in particular on the later Republic and early centuries of the Roman Empire. The volume is designed as an introductory work, with brief chapters that will be accessible to college students with little knowledge of legal matters or Roman antiquity. The text is also free of technical language and Latin terminology. It can be used in courses on Roman law, Roman history, or comparative law, but it will also serve as a useful reference for more advanced students and scholars.

Winner, AAP/PSP Award for Excellence, Classics and Ancient History, 2006 Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with Latin knows "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" ("All Gaul is divided into three parts"), the opening line of De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar's famous commentary on his campaigns against the Gauls in the 50s BC. But what did Caesar intend to accomplish by writing and publishing his commentaries, how did he go about it, and what potentially unforeseen consequences did his writing have? These are the questions that Andrew Riggsby pursues in this fresh interpretation of one of the masterworks of Latin prose. Riggsby uses contemporary literary methods to examine the historical impact that the commentaries had on the Roman reading public. In the first part of his study, Riggsby considers how Caesar defined Roman identity and its relationship to non-Roman others. He shows how Caesar opens up a possible vision of the political future in which the distinction between Roman and non-Roman becomes less important because of their joint submission to a Caesar-like leader. In the second part, Riggsby analyzes Caesar's political self-fashioning and the potential effects of his writing and publishing the Gallic War. He reveals how Caesar presents himself as a subtly new kind of Roman general who deserves credit not only for his own virtues, but for those of his soldiers as well. Riggsby uses case studies of key topics (spatial representation, ethnography, virtus and technology, genre, and the just war), augmented by more synthetic discussions that bring in evidence from other Roman and Greek texts, to offer a broad picture of the themes of national identity and Caesar's self-presentation.

In the late Roman Republic, acts of wrongdoing against individuals were prosecuted in private courts, while the iudicia publica (literally "public courts") tried cases that involved harm to the community as a whole. In this book, Andrew M. Riggsby thoroughly investigates the types of cases heard by the public courts to offer a provocative new understanding of what has been described as "crime" in the Roman Republic and to illuminate the inherently political nature of the Roman public courts.

Through the lens of Cicero's forensic oratory, Riggsby examines the four major public offenses: ambitus (bribery of the electorate), de sicariis et veneficiis (murder), vis (riot), and repetundae (extortion by provincial administrators). He persuasively argues that each of these offenses involves a violation of the proper relations between the state and the people, as interpreted by orators and juries. He concludes that in the late Roman Republic the only crimes were political crimes.

In this book, Andrew Riggsby offers a survey of the main areas of Roman law, both substantive and procedural, and how the legal world interacted with the rest of Roman life. Emphasizing basic concepts, he recounts its historical development and focuses in particular on the later Republic and early centuries of the Roman Empire. The volume is designed as an introductory work, with brief chapters that will be accessible to college students with little knowledge of legal matters or Roman antiquity. The text is also free of technical language and Latin terminology. It can be used in courses on Roman law, Roman history, or comparative law, but it will also serve as a useful reference for more advanced students and scholars.