Historical development of Roman Maritime Law during the Late Republic and Early Principate
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Date
23/11/2019Author
Candy, Peter Frank
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Abstract
In the period between the end of the Second Punic War and the early
Principate, several sources of evidence combine to indicate that the Roman
economy experienced some measure of (probably real) growth. At the same
time, this was also the period during which Rome’s legal institutions were most
radically developed. The question that arises is, what part (if any) did the
development of Roman law play in the city’s economic history during this
period? This is a big question, which it is outside of the scope of this thesis to
answer. Rather, the aim of this study is to take a first step in this direction, by
providing an evidential foundation upon which to base hypotheses about the
relationship between changes in the intensity of transactional activity and legal
development in the context of the Roman world.
One of the pillars for the case for growth is the observation that the evidence
for the chronological distribution of shipwrecks located in the Mediterranean
Basin indicates that there was a steep increase in maritime traffic in the second
and first centuries BCE. In the first place, by studying the chronological
development of Roman legal institutions relevant to the conduct of longdistance
trade, this investigation shows that these developed in parallel with
the increase in the intensity of maritime commercial activity. In the second, by
constructing a model of the process by which long-distance trade was typically
conducted, I demonstrate that the legal remedies that arose were specific to
the relationships typically entered into by merchants in the course of
transporting goods to their intended market. In this way, the pattern of legal
change that emerges from the evidence is best understood as the
development of Roman ‘merchant law’, even if the Romans themselves did not
conceive of it as such.