Introduction: Roman Wars and Roman Laws

Introduction: Roman Wars and Roman Laws

Description

How can questions concerning imperial expansion be addressed from the perspective of justice? To what extent does law provide a satisfactory way of making assessments of the justice or rectitude of imperial wars, imperial conquests, and governance within a far-flung empire? How does the law concerning relations within and between empires overlap or differ from the law concerning interstate relations? To what extent are specific practices and legal principles of the Roman empire instantiations of arguments about universal moral principles of justice in imperial and interstate relations applicable also to other contexts? In The Wars of the Romans, first published in its complete form by Wilhelm Anton in Hanau-am-Main in 1599, the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili explicitly deals with the military expansion of the Roman empire from the perspectives of law and justice. The publication of De armis Romanis followed the publication in 1598, by the same publisher, of Gentili’s most widely known and influential work, The Law of War (De iure belli libri tres). De armis Romanis appeared as a single volume, comprising two books. The first book, under the title “Indictment of the Injustice of the Romans in Warfare,” constitutes an attack on Roman imperialism in thirteen chapters, accusing the Romans of unjust warfare and culminating in a chapter on “The Tyranny of the Romans.” The second book, titled “Defense of the Justice of the Romans in Warfare,” aims at rebutting chapter by chapter the accusations of injustice made in the first book, concluding with a eulogy of Roman imperialism in the final chapter, “The Good Fortune of the Roman Empire.” The prosecution of Roman imperialism in the first book is entrusted to “Picenus,” while the defense has as its voice that of “a Roman,” a Roman, however, familiar with many of Gentili’s contemporary authors and thus clearly not of the classical era. “Picenus” means someone hailing from ancient Picenum, the modern Marche d’Ancona in Italy, which is Alberico Gentili’s native region; moreover, the Picenus in question is clearly identified as being from San Ginesio, Gentili’s place of birth, and as a civil lawyer by education. This poses a puzzle for the reader—the critic of Roman imperialism is given the trappings and vestments of Alberico Gentili, yet Gentili himself as author of the two books seems rather more sympathetic to the point of view expressed in Book 2 by the Roman. This may be simply a literary device to maintain the tension of the debate. A further explanation, suggested by David Lupher, is connected to the history of the development of The Wars of the Romans. The work had developed out of a pair of speeches originally devised as public speeches (actiones) to be delivered at ceremonial occasions at the faculty of law at the University of Oxford. The first version of the first speech had originally been published by the printer of Oxford University, Joseph Barnes, under the title De iniustitia bellica Romanorum actio, accompanied by a dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux (reprinted, with English translation, as an Appendix to the present volume). The dedication mentions that Gentili had “ready a defense of the Romans and a disputation directly opposed to this one on their justice in making wars,” but the second speech was never published in its original form. Lupher suggests that when Gentili revised, and considerably expanded, the speeches for publication as The Wars of the Romans in the late 1590s, calling the prosecutor of Book 1 “Picenus” was an ironic way of acknowledging the printed earlier version of the “indictment,” which had appeared under Gentili’s name. When writing in the voice of the Roman defender of imperialism of Book 2, Gentili dismisses ironically the stance of the prosecutor in Book 1 as that of a narrow-minded provincial from San Ginesio. As the titles of its two books suggest, The Wars of the Romans affirms and indeed presupposes that considerations of justice are relevant to international relations and to proper assessment of the behavior and norms of imperial Rome. In writing the arguments for both sides in the debate about the justice of the Roman empire, Gentili does not attribute to either side the claim that there are no moral norms that govern and constrain the external or internal actions of states. To the contrary, both the indictment of Roman imperialism in Book 1 of The Wars of the Romans and its defense in Book 2 are predicated on the assumption that it is apposite to judge the expansion of the Roman empire by way of warfare according to certain moral normative criteria—indeed, denying or affirming the justice of the Roman empire is precisely what The Wars of the Romans is all about. The accusation against the Roman empire is not framed principally in terms of the prudential considerations that inform much thought in the realist tradition of politics, but instead focuses on criteria of justice; and the defense in Book 2 maintains, not that making claims of justice in the international realm is essentially impossible or undesirable, but that Roman imperialism was just. There are nonetheless strands in Book 2 of arguments that attribute some justificatory force to self-interest and raison d ’état. Gentili’s early interest in Machiavelli’s thought, evident, for example, in his De legationibus (1585), can be traced to these aspects of De armis Romanis.

Source Publication

The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De Armis Romanis

Source Editors/Authors

Benedict Kingsbury, Benjamin Straumann

Publication Date

2011

Edition

1

Introduction: Roman Wars and Roman Laws

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