Laws’ empire: Roman universalism and legal practice

Sometime in the late third or possibly early fourth century, a rhetorician, writing in Greek, probably in the Roman provinces of the East, composed a treatise on epideictic rhetoric (the rhetoric of praise and blame). Transmitted under the name of Menander of Laodicea (a city in southwest Asia Minor), the treatise advises orators on how to praise gods, peoples, and cities according to a long and technical tradition of encomiastic speech. There are explicit references to Isocrates’ Panathenaicus, various works by Plato, the “encomium on Sicily” in Cicero, and orations by Aelius Aristides on both Rome and Athens. Among other subjects, we find specific advice on how an orator should assess the actions of a city, according to the four classical philosophical virtues: courage, justice, temperance (sōphrosunē), and practical wisdom (phronēsis). After a lengthy discussion concerning how a city’s actions should be praised according to the virtue of justice, and some brief pointers concerning praise for temperance “in public life” and then in relation to the household, the discussion turns to the virtue of practical wisdom: In the public sphere, we consider whether the city accurately lays down legal conventions and the subject matter of the laws – such as inheritances by heirs and other topics covered by the laws. (This aspect, however, is now redundant, because we use the universal laws of the Romans.) Within the private sphere, the issue is whether there are many famous rhetors, sophists, geometricians, and representatives of other sciences that depend on practical wisdom. According to the author of this late Greco-Roman treatise, praising cities for the display of practical wisdom in the legal sphere was an outdated activity. Public officials in the cities of the East no longer exercised their practical wisdom in framing their own laws and legal procedures, because the inhabitants of their cities used “the universal laws of the Romans.” Thus, whereas Isocrates (fourth century bce) and Aristides (mid-second century ce) could both use “the topic of laws” to amplify their praise of a city, rhetoricians working under the later Roman Empire apparently could not. The orator can now praise a city only for its ēthē (customs). The implication is that by the late third century ce, the Greco-Roman cities in the East had lost whatever autonomy they had previously possessed as lawgivers.