Access to law in Late Antiquity: Status, corruption, and the evidence of the 'Codex Hermogenianus' (Roman Empire)

Historical treatments of the Roman legal world have focused on lawyers and their elite clients, but most clients came from the middling sort, whose daily lives and legal experiences have received little attention. My dissertation draws on a little-used legal code, as well as papyrological, epigraphic, archaeological and onomastic evidence, to provide the first detailed discussion of law and life for these ordinary people in the Roman Empire.; I use the evidence of papyri to show that non-elites gained an understanding of law from social connections, not from education or literature, as is often claimed, and also from legal professionals, such as lawyers and notaries. The formulaic nature and appearance of legal documents on papyri demonstrates that notaries helped non-elites draw up the legal documents that accompany most rites of passage or undertakings in life.; Turning to legal disputes, I use papyri and inscriptions to re-evaluate from the point of view of the users existing models of the system of petition-and-response, a method of seeking justice widely used by non-elites. I conclude that the system did not suffer from corruption significant enough to deter non-elite petitioners.; From my examination of the Codex Hermogenianus, a Diocletianic collection of 900 or so responses to petitions preserved in the often-neglected Codex Justinianus, I show that the system was used by a broad range of people---one third were women, and more slaves received answers to petitions than did soldiers---and that the responses were written by a hard-working team of officials, not by the emperor. In a comparison with epigraphical, archaeological, and onomastic evidence, I then demonstrate that these responses offer more detailed information about local legal services and about the makeup and activities of local populations than is available outside Egypt from any other source.; Finally, I take a longer view of systems of petition-and-response in the ancient world to argue that non-elites' access to law through the system of petition-and-response is a persistent feature of Greek and Roman administrations that has been overlooked because of historians' traditional neglect of legal sources.