"Ancient history, law and emotions.

An interview with Ramsay

MacMullen", Salvo Randazzo, Legal Roots 7 (2018) 3-19

In this interview Ramsay MacMullen, a great scholar in ancient history1,

explains his lifetime preference for subjects discovered among sectors of
the population of little interest to ancient writers, therefore also of little
interest to modern classicists; for, most naturally, classicists focus on
language and literature or on individuals as they illuminate an approved
canon. MacMullen’s preference has rather been «democratic, ... blame it
on sympathies». «Sympathies» helps to explain also his many articles
and several books focused on, or giving space to, the emotions.
Emotions, being wrapped around a society’s values, give energy to
behavior, as a historian of course must understand («Motivation» being
the subtitle to his 2014 book). It was a great honor for me to interview
Ramsay MacMullen. My discussions with him over some twenty years
have been a precious source of enrichment, curiosity and knowledge for
me. But, first of all, I had a chance to appreciate his extraordinary
humanity, a rare quality, a quality that is only possessed by greatest
scholars and by best people [SR].
1
Ramsay MacMullen (b. New York 1928) is a historian emeritus from
Yale University. With an AB, AM, and PhD (1957) from Harvard, he
has taught at the University of Oregon, Brandeis University, and Yale
(1967-1993). His books, almost half translated into European or Asian
languages, include two (one of them, his biggest ever) in 19th century
American history; two in philosophy (2003, Feelings in History; 2014,
Why Do We Do What We Do? Motivation in History and the Social
Sciences); the rest in ancient Roman history from the 8th century B.C. to
the 6th century A.D. A particular focus has been religious history, both
non-Christian and Christian. Among 70+ articles, a good example is
“Roman elite motivation: three questions”, Past & Present 1980. He
served as head of the U.S.-Canadian Association of Ancient Historians
and in 2000 received a Lifetime Award for Scholarly Distinction. He
lives in New Haven USA.
4

SR: Professor MacMullen, I can’t help asking at the start,

since my own field of interest is law, what has been your
intersection with that? You’ve published in a law journal and
about law and its effects, but that was back in the 1960s. Then
you seem to have lost interest in the subject. How did that
happen?
RM: It’s a fair question. It throws me back on my early years,
when I was a great reader of stories as I am still, even trying
my hand at writing novels (fortunately unpublished). At
college I decided I’d take my degree or «major» in literature,
and I did meet the requirements, but then I switched and did
another major in history. In literature as it’s taught – as it’s
academic – you’re invited to look at not through the page. It’s
the writing that is your concern; perhaps also the writer. I
wasn’t good at that. I preferred not to analyze the page but to
enter the world to which writers invited me and to join in the
re- creation of its scenes and feelings within the outlines they
suggested. You can read history in the same way, at least as I
see it, looking for a reality on the far side. The historical facts
give the outline and the setting of the story but there is a lot to
be supplied by yourself, the reader. That includes the
emotions. Emotions are the driving force and there was no
place for this exercise of my mind in the study of Roman law.
When confronted with it, I couldn’t help wondering, where are
the people?
There have been attempts to bring two or three late Roman
jurists to life as individuals, but not to anyone’s satisfaction.
One of the most famous jurists from a little earlier is the great
Gaius of the Institutes. We don’t even know his clan or last
name. It disappeared over the course of generations of law
students abbreviating it. Instead, we have Gaius as the name
only of a puppet, a handy figment, along with Titius, whom
jurists once used to illustrate actions at law, one puppet against
the other. When I was introduced to these two in an
undergraduate course by a Dr. Bruch, they were of course not
meant to be real, but only illustrative. The conceptual structure
being explained to us was indeed a piece of history, and a very
important one, but as abstract and unreal a thing as the model
Stoic or Epicurean.
SR: How about Apuleius or Dio Chrysostom engaged in
court? Aren’t these real-life persons in action, therefore
making history at least on a small scale? Not to mention
Cicero and his clients on a very large scale? And when you
came to write about «Women’s power» in the 1977, you called
attention to the unexpected percentage of women in litigation
as it’s reported in the Justinian Code, reckoned by Liselot
Huchthausen at between a quarter and a third. So indeed there
are individuals to be considered in the sources.
RM: You’re right, and I’m not consistent. Blame it on my
sympathies. I’ve always felt I could leave the literate, wealthy
ruling class to others. The extreme case is Cicero and his like.
The oligarchs of the later Republic will never lack their
biographers. Instead, I was drawn to the under-reported, where
I needn’t try to imagine myself as some great politician or
soldier – I certainly didn’t feel like those types – and where
there was, is, and always will be the most work to be done by
historians, to the extent the sources allow. Huchthausen
showed the possibilities. Not only women were litigants but
the very most despised classes, too, could somehow get their
chance in court. The fact would be worth explaining in detail,
if one could. It implies little-known chinks in the social
structure, and these would interest me more than the forms of
law that engaged them. On those forms as on the upper class,
there is no lack of scholarly focus.
5

Why this special interest? The argument would be that obscure

individuals almost by definition don’t count. They can’t hold
our attention. History can properly ignore them. The counter-
argument is, that where they were numerous, as of course they
were, then in the aggregate they helped to determine the
workings of their society, making them a good target for study
– democratic study.
SR: Isn’t individual history as biography a part of history, too,
and the most consequential? And isn’t a great deal of
biography woven into the historical sources, in bits and pieces
– as in Livy or Dio Cassius – or given formal, individual
treatment in Plutarch or Suetonius?
RM: Yes, of course, and for that very reason I have steered
away from the literary sources, preferring the non-literary and
archeological. By my desk for many decades I’ve had two
photographs of scholars I specially admired, one, an
archeologist and epigrapher, Terence Mitford, the other the
great Rostovtzeff, who concluded his career at Yale. It was
Rostovtzeff in 1926 who had thrown open the non-literary
evidence to study, with one big book that opened up every
class of society to historians – if they chose to learn from him.
I did try my hand at a biography, choosing the emperor
Constantine, but only under the pressure of school-bills to pay.
I was promised a lump sum for it and that was enough.
Otherwise, if I tried military history, I skipped the upper ranks
to concentrate on the mass of the soldiery; and if I tried social
history, I began with the poorest, lowest ranks like shepherds
or the transport laborers of Rome, even the beggars; if I tried
religion, I looked most inquiringly at memorial rites which
were of such importance to the least of Roman society, as
much as to the elite. And I think I’ve written the only study
actually titled «Peasants», though I had a lot more to learn
about this population later from scholars like Brent Shaw.
Peasants made up a good half of the population, probably
more depending on a definition.
It wasn’t my choice to avoid the obvious subjects, the low-
hanging fruit as they’d be termed, simply to make some
original contribution. Among the aristocracy also there are
non-obvious topics that can prove immensely rewarding in the
right hands. John Matthews provides the proof; so does Susan
Treggiari; and both have made major contributions to the
history of Roman law, as it happens. But my democratic
choice of direction was determined by my shift from literature
to history, as I mentioned.
6
SR: Was ancient history at Harvard, then, in your many years
of study there, a subject seen as needing Rostovtzeff’s
approach? Was Harvard especially open to his teachings? I
don’t think Oxford and Cambridge were at that time, or are so
even now.
RM: No, Harvard wasn’t especially open at all. My Roman
and Greek history professors had both done their graduate
work at Oxbridge so naturally they approached classical
history in an Oxonian, Canterbridgian way. As the Oxbridge
guru, Momigliano, put it, Classics in these institutions was «a
field where good philologists are many but historians few».2 In
the Harvard history department, however, as distinct from the
Classics, things were different. To explain: it is a given that
academic subjects for teaching and research are to be entrusted
to persons with suitable training. Their professional careers
begin with an advanced degree, their teachers themselves held
advanced degrees in the chosen discipline. The assumption is
that long training shapes the way you think about some great
mass of data, and what sort of questions you ask, making you a
sociologist not an anthropologist even though there may be
7
some overlap; or you’re a biologist not a microbiologist.3
Without the right focus you just won’t be hired for a job.
So it is with history. My own training was quite typical: an
undergraduate major in the discipline, then postgraduate
courses. Most of my focus was on medieval European and
modern European and U. S. history, and most of my students
and course-preparation for a good number of years when I
began teaching were in those areas, too. Ancient history later
crowded them out, but only gradually.
And what my broader training taught me was that any
understanding of the past must include entire populations, not
just the uppermost three per cent, six percent, or a bit more.
All types and classes of people together shape events and
developments. For that reason, history only from the top down
can only be bad history; even if it’s biographical, the society
and events surrounding the subject must be taken into account.
2
Arnaldo MOMIGLIANO reviewing Ronald SYME, The Roman Revolution,
in Journal of Roman Studies 30, 1940, 75 = Secondo Contributo alla
storia degli studi classici Roma-Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960
407.
3
I sketched out these common assumptions in “History in classics”, in
Classics, a Discipline and Profession in Crisis? eds. Phyllis Culham and
Lowell Edmunds, London-New York-Lanham, 1990. As to the Harvard
professors Mason Hammond (Roman) and Sterling Dow (Greek
history), their advanced degrees were respectively from Oxford and
Cambridge.

Approach from the bottom up may sometimes make more

sense. Call it the democratic way. It means taking obscure
people into account, if only as aggregates. In my specialty,
however, we see a quite extraordinary exception to this rule of
training. The historian of Greece and Rome or of some still
earlier era, in order to earn a teaching appointment at the
college level, will master languages and literature, not history,
nine times out of ten. That’s still the case as Momigliano said
far back in the ‘40s. I could see the consequences even as an
undergraduate, having to take the huge fat volumes of the
Cambridge Ancient History as a guide to my specialty and
there stumbling on a mention of Roman «guilds» as they were
called – that is, trade associations. But it was a mention of no
more than a line or two; whereas in the modern history I was
studying, of course such organizations were and are still seen
as major players. I determined to learn more about «guilds», I
held on to that ambition, and when my language studies were
over after six long years, I could finally turn to that focus of
curiosity for my dissertation. I met with no help at all, but no
obstacles either. In the absence of the Roman history professor
on a sabbatical year, I began and completed the task under the
supervision of the professor of medieval Latin, whose only
comment on my work at the end was that «You should take
out the chokes» (the «jokes», in his German accent).
My subject was state socialism in the later Empire. It was, I
may say, a pretty good choice, tying in the artisan class to
imperial legislation and administration (and I could have
added the agriculturalist work-force). Today in the right hands
it would make a good book. You could call the topic «low-
hanging fruit», the easiest to pick, only because Classicists
ignored it. They generally didn’t care to look into happenings
in other periods and countries for hints or ideas; nor could they
ever imagine tradespeople making events.
I was similarly helped toward my second book, Enemies of the
Roman Order (1966). I had meant to call it The Unromans,
recalling the House UnAmerican Activities Committee of
then-recent notoriety; but my publishers wouldn’t allow my
choice. Choosing dissidence and unrest as my subject, I had
Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels (1959) to point the way.
I’m sure Hobsbawm had lodged in the back of my mind
somewhere, like trade associations in the nineteenth century,
thanks to my exposure to worlds beyond Greco-Roman
antiquity. I had at the time a colleague in U.S. history who was
alive to a democratic perspective in his teaching and writing in
a very attractive style. His name very appropriately was
«Ginger». Eventually I happened on Howard Zinn, a big name
in the same style, and got to know him, too, a little before he
died. His best-known book, also translated into French, has
sold over two million copies, mostly to America’s high-school
and college students. It has been immensely influential; also,
immensely democratic, not to say far-left.
8
SR: Do you see yourself as a leftist historian? You’ve written
on workers’ strikes, and one of your articles often cited is on
Roman slavery. There I can see a subject that would draw you
into ideological discussions. About the same time, you were
writing another piece on «the historical role of the masses».
Was all this because of an intellectual engagement with the
political left – a political tilt?4
RM: A tilt, yes, but not in any devoted, card-carrying fashion.
The Cold War in the early 1950s had given currency to the
term «card-carrying», whether Communist or other, and this
drew from me a protest-letter to a Boston paper, my first
venture into print; but those McCarthy times were a
provocation to so many people to speak out. There were other
years of provocation to follow, in the 1960s. On the other
hand, my first look at real live card-carriers came in the early
1970s. I was a member of the American delegation to an
international congress of historical sciences, where three
Soviet scholars attended. The three of them looked like so
many tough, jailer-types (all women as it happened), more or
less identical and impossible to get an answer from, when
discussion followed their spoken contribution.

4
A note on Roman strikes, in Classical Journal 58, 1963, 269-71, Late
Roman slavery, in Historia 36, 1987, 359-382; The historical role of the
masses, in Changes in the Roman Empire. Essays in the Ordinary
Princeton 1990, 250-276, a piece accepted for the Cambridge Ancient
History, second edition, but withdrawn.

SR: You said earlier that your teaching narrowed from ancient,
medieval and modern, to ancient alone, but only gradually.
How and when did that happen? Did you feel any regret at this
sharper focusing on the truly remote past? Any loss of
engagement?
RM: Narrowing was actually a very welcome process. It eased
some of my dreadful worry about my competence or
incompetence in lectures. In history, the American pattern of
teaching responsibilities was and still is to hand over
introductory courses to the most junior instructors. They’re
expected to range over the widest areas and questions, about
which they are obviously the least able to speak with any ease.
To lead 250 students through the whole flow of the Western
past from Hammurabi’s laws to the Nuremberg trials was and
still is the job of mere beginners. For myself, anyway, in my
first job on the west coast, it meant staying up late to learn in a
hurry what I must explain the next morning; and what I got
hold of in this indigestive, anxious way didn’t stay with me, so
I had to do it all over again, or mostly anyway, the next year,
for years. By the time I was at last more at home with this
mass of information, I had also succeeded in sufficient
publication to qualify for a position teaching only my
specialty, the Greek and Roman past, and I was in this way
able to get a job closer to my aging parents on the east coast,
in the Boston area, at just the right time. The university was
Brandeis next door to Boston, founded by the Jewish
community in 1948.
9

There, in the ‘fifties, the curriculum still reflected the pride

and source of that institution’s founding. Faculty had a wide
freedom in choosing subjects for their courses, and I couldn’t
help noticing how ill-served a student would be who wanted to
know about Christianity. That would mean, where Western
music came from, what the Crusades were all about, or how
ever the Greek and Roman classics had been preserved at all
across so many centuries. It was an act of conscience on my
part to try to fill the gap with Christian history. But I had no
previous special interest in religion, let alone in the early
Church, so the best I could do was offer a course called
«Paganism and Christianity» in 1966, which I taught thereafter
many times at Yale.
SR: And you used that course title as the title for one of your
books, I see, and you wrote another book called «Christianity
and Paganism»; still a third called simply «Paganism in the
Roman Empire», not to mention a fourth, «Christianizing the
Roman Empire»; a fifth, «The Second Church»; and one called
«Voting About God» in 2009 on the subject of early councils.
You wrote many articles on these same matters in your list. It
is a wonder to me that someone who had no interest in
religious history could punish himself over the course of so
many years with such a great heap of research and publication.
Besides trying to broaden the Brandeis curriculum, had you
perhaps been converted from your previous indifference,
maybe converted to paganism like the emperor Julian or to
Manichaeism like the youthful Augustine?
10

RM: It was a paradoxical turn I took, yes, or a comical one;

but I blame it on my training in history, as I have blamed other
turns as well. I was early taught, somehow – not in so many
words – that if you want to make case for there being, let’s
say, a crime wave in some little town of 25,000, it’s enough if
you support your proposition with no more than a murder or
two. A couple of murders might be enough for some grand
pundit in the newspaper to use when he wants to see a crisis in
the whole nation at large. Pundits can get away with anything.
Historians, however, won’t talk so big without supporting
evidence on the same scale. You might say they’re obeying the
rule of evidentiary proportionality. Big data for big
propositions. Or you can call it plain common sense.
When, in contrast, I began reading about religion in Roman
times, I often found what seemed to me the most inadequately
supported general statements in the best regarded books and
articles. They invited a new look at all sorts of neglected
questions – «low-hanging fruit», easy to pick, good chances to
correct the record. Beyond that, they were really provoking for
the very reason that they were so serenely accepted. My
response was not so much to point out where I disagreed, as
simply to offer an alternative with better support. That’s what I
11
was doing in those books and articles that you mention, and
others still up to my very latest.5 For me, it was as much a
campaign in method as in subject matter.

SR: Isn’t that body of publication about religion in itself an

expression of some personal tilts? And we should recall the
promise of Tacitus, that he himself wrote – and he means that
every historian ought to write – sine ira et studio. «No anger,
no partisan zeal.» Yet you, you admit to being provoked,
enough to give energy to an ongoing campaign of correction
aimed at inadequate method, over the span of a generation or
more. What do you think Tacitus would have said about it?
RM: I suppose Tacitus, being so conservative and certainly
polytheist, would be glad to forgive someone who aimed at
neutrality, at least in the face of the triumphant Christian turn
in Rome’s fortunes. But about that triumph, should neutrality
be seen as hostility? Great scholars like Henry Chadwick or
Wayne Meeks would know better. They’ve shown how to
write about the past without distortion – both, declared
Christians but also declared historians. That’s the point: you
can be faithful to faith and also to your profession. But if your
training is not in history but in languages and theology, well
then, your research may not answer to the rules and restraints
of the historical discipline. You may insist on the rightness of
a partisan account.
One thing, however, I was sure of from my years as a student
of history of all periods and my later years still, teaching
myself in order to write and teach others. I was sure that the
traditional narrative of Christianity’s triumph was really most
unlikely. All the analogies spoke against it. I could think of
lots of them. Of course they didn’t prove anything, but in a
chosen area for research, analogies will suggest kinds of
evidence to look for, that is, probability. For historians, this
and not logic is the chief, almost the only, instrument of
discovery; here lies the value of training.
I could see there was no probability that a missionary effort
would continue after the last of Paul’s disciples disappeared
from the scene, at least, no probability so long as nothing like
this was attested. There was, instead, evidence of angry
resistance from people when their traditional faith was
challenged. That familiar story began with the Jews
themselves, against Paul, and led to continual disruptions,
often violent, within the Christian population, among sects
calling each other heretical. These also were well reported. In
due course Christians became numerous enough to be taken
seriously.

5
As an example, I instance my problems with Franz Cumont, in chapter
5 and elsewhere of my Paganism in the Roman Empire, New Haven-
London, 1981; a corrective also in Roman religion: the best attested
practice, in Historia 66, 2017, 111-27; and an illustrative exercise in an
article titled Holy men in profile, ca. 250-550 in draft.
12
They were called atheists by the majority around them, for the
obvious reason that they denied the existence of all gods
except their own; so they were persecuted. Once they had their
own emperor on the throne in command of the law and its
enforcement, probability suggested there would be steps taken
to discourage worship or make worship impossible so long as
it was not Christian. Looking for signs of this, I certainly
found a great many, enough to make a big book and parts of
two others, and some conference papers and articles.
Who reads any of this? Did the windmills know Don Quixote
was tilting at them? At a week-long conference of relevant
scholars a few years later, gathered to consider the conversion
of the West, one of our group could not swallow my saying, «a
majority of a settled population has never in history, I believe,
abandoned its settled religion except in the face of superior
force.»6 This was how I summed up the paper I had just
presented. But my friend across the table simply could not
believe his ears and asked a third person, Was the statement
true? Yes, that person said, luckily for me. My friend
challenging me was rightly distinguished in his field and
discipline – which was not history.
At another moment a decade later I discovered I had in fact
had a reader, a person named David Hart – a freelance student
and conservative Catholic columnist who wrote for the more
conservative Catholic audience. He wrote a book, too, in
which many pages and most of one whole chapter took aim
against myself. Thus he demolished «fashionable atheism».
For doing so, the archbishop of Canterbury, his wife, and other
members of a committee awarded the author a prize of £
10,000. The publicity and a photo of the award-ceremony
opens up a world of blogs and media with which he is
specially engaged.7 It is not a world that readily tolerates
neutrality.
SR: There’s something familiar here, isn’t there? Western
society seems to be permeated with new forms of intolerance.
The reasons are complicated: there is massive immigration
from Africa, there is Islamic terrorism, nationalism with real
or fake ethnic roots. Can history help with this troubling
present scene?
RM: I would certainly like to think so but in our world today,
it’s hard to feel much confidence. What you point to is a great
tangle of problems, something I should leave to media pundits.

6
Christianity shaped through its mission, in Origins of Christendom in
the West, ed. Alan Kreider, T & T Clark-Edinburgh-New York 2001, 97-
117 at 106.
7
Atheist Delusions. The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable
Enemies, New Haven, Yale UP, 2009; on the web, search «Michael
Ramsey Prize», «Previous winners», for 2011, also the author’s name
where his media-connections and bibliography are shown.
12
Against my own advice, I do venture to say about the Islamic
world, where traditional loyalties throughout take a form
strange to us, we don’t seem to address the realities of
fundamental allegiance very well. Loyalty took form around
extended families, and so to tribes or as I prefer to call them,
clans, which underlie present-day political behavior. These are
unfamiliar to ourselves in the industrialized world. We don’t
deal with them very intelligently throughout the Middle East
and parts of Africa. To explain how they work, and can be
worked, I instance the success of an unusual chieftain in the
Sudan, «The Man Called Deng Majok«. For decades he kept
African clans at peace with each other, and all of them, at
peace with neighboring Arabs.8 Here’s history with an
anthropological reminder in it. Reading his biography helps to
explain our ill-success with Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Syria, and with the family split, Sunni-Shia, dividing Arabia
and Iran in ways we can’t control according to our own
priorities.
We have our quite different Western problems. We’re not
tribalized but industrialized, that is, capitalist. We’ve decided
that democracy gives us our best chance at wise choices.
Democracy and capitalism, however, don’t seem to mix very
well. That fact was confronted directly in two recent American
Supreme Court cases, «Citizens United» (2010) and
«McDonnell vs. United States» (2016). They affirmed the
right, first, to give money to candidates to win public office,
and then the right to give more still once candidates have
attained office. The court’s decisions said a lot about the
perceived realities of today, confirmed by all sorts of
authoritative spokesmen, whether in elections to office or in a
legislative body – all, «democratic» in quotation marks, where
many points of interaction of the everyday citizen with
authority figures are complicated or facilitated by bribes.9
That’s the truth, no more welcome because it’s also existential.
We can see how important it has been for Italy and the
Ukraine, Zimbabwe or Kenya, Brazil or China; we can see the
acknowledgment of the fact in an extraordinary focus of
interest on the problem in academia, the media, and the
citizenry across the globe. Italy’s«mani pulite» campaign of
the 1990s will be recalled as a beginning of it all.

8
Francis MADING DENG, The Man Called Deng Majok, New Haven,
Yale UP 1986, passim, showing how peace was maintained in the Sudan
for certain decades of the past century despite ethnic rivalries.
9
I offer some quotations from authoritative figures in Comparative
corruption, past and present, in Journal of Social, Political and
Economic Studies 42, 2017, 391 ff.
13
In the Anglophone world, Lord Acton’s words have become
almost a proverb, they are so familiar: «Power corrupts,
absolute power corrupts absolutely», and so on. The joining of
power and money had weighed on the discussions of
America’s founding fathers exactly a hundred years earlier, in
1787. As Gouverneur Morris warned, «Wealth tends to corrupt
the mind and to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to
oppression. History proves this.»10 And just how could history
do this? Only by analogies. «Proof» in 1787 fell short of
demonstration, as it still does. The founding fathers, although
they had hope, had no illusions.
Still, it makes no sense to address such huge questions as
these, as I am doing, showing with only odds and ends of
evidence how I would approach them – so long as there are
millions and millions of people better worth listening to than
myself.

10
Zephyr TEACHOUT, Corruption in America, Cambridge, Harvard UP
2014, 55, quoting Gouverneur Morris; further, chaps. 2-3 passim. The
author is an elected Congressional representative.
SR: If we turned to approaches as methods rather than with
examples, would the questions be any clearer? You’ve always
been quite progressive in your approach to Roman history,
without strict regard to the boundaries of one discipline or
another. Do you think historians of society and historians of
law could agree on some common «method»?
RM: Yes, certainly, in the fashion of a Venn diagram, that is,
with overlap. If I were not so out-of-date in my ordinary
reading I would, I’m sure, find much evidence of this fact
being recognized. What I have in mind, as I think most
historians would find natural, is what I would call a situational
approach, which looks at law within a society; is intended to
express that society’s ideas of right and wrong; and
additionally, considers actual enforcement. In my first note on
the subject (1964) I was drawing partly on extra-legal texts,
partly on those parts of laws which manifestly were not
observed. To add to that, in illustration: in the preface to the
Life of Saint Hypatius, clearly in some regions fifth century
people could choose what sort of profession or job they would
settle on, in defiance of many laws that were meant to bind
most in their inherited occupations. That area of law was
reality, undeniably. How much and in what way, it is for law-
history specialists to consider.
By the time I returned to the subject (1986) it was judicial
savagery that I focused on, mostly because I found it so
horrifying. Perhaps that should not be an excuse for my
choice; in any case, the development was especially revealing
of a prominent line in the history of law. The sources proved
very rich, with lots of contradictions and contemporary
justifications or condemnations. Overall, however, you could
see a relentless progress toward barbarity. I did not attempt
explanation, only description. I gave the facts; but a historian
may offer a similar progress in England in the space of no
more than 75 years (from ca. 1690 on), where capital crimes
increased from fewer than fifty, to more than three times that
number.11 That fact, that analogous fact, invited and received
explanation, through the politics of the time. What groups and
what interests were decisive? The same question could be put
to the Roman centuries, I suppose. Perhaps it has been done,
and in extenso, and I need to learn more. In those centuries,
historians are agreed about many important changes in way of
life, demography, interregional trade and transport,
socioeconomic stratification, weight of prestige of various
ranks and occupations, and so forth. All of these changes are
probably woven into discussions of Roman law, which I am
not familiar with.

11
Jacob BRONOWSKI, A Man Without a Mask, Taunton 1943, 24.
15

I needn’t point out my liking for those chance words in the

sources when writers reveal things they don’t think are
especially important, or suitable for polite, educated
discussion. To catch witnesses in an unguarded moment is
what a good lawyer does; also, historians. At worst, it’s called
reductionist, a term of praise in my opinion. It is at least
positivism, which is not quite so out of fashion. In strategies of
this sort, everyone must decide which suits them best –
hoping, may the best one win.
SR: Professor MacMullen, thank you very much for this
interview.