The present book by Zachary Herz is an ambitious, imaginative, and at times provocative study of the role of law in the configuration of Roman imperial power. Situated at the intersection of ancient history and Roman law, the author defends a clear thesis throughout the volume: “Roman legality” should not be understood as a faithful reflection of ancient legal practice, but rather as a repertoire of narratives through which the Romans articulated ideas about their political world and, very especially, about the state and imperial sovereignty.
This places the book within studies situated between historical and legal perspectives –such as Simon Corcoran (1996)[1], Serena Connolly (2011)[2], Kaius Tuori (2016)[3], Benjamin Kelly (2011)[4] or Ari Bryen (2013)[5]– which have demonstrated the value of legal sources for understanding both the internal logics of imperial administration and its elites, and the strategies through which subaltern groups interacted with these structures. While aligning with this approach, Herz distances himself from any attempt to reconstruct the actual workings of Roman law through its normative texts. For him, law functions primarily as a mechanism of political self‑representation, a performative device through which Romans imagined and legitimized imperial power. The book thus aligns with the modern tradition that emphasizes the inherent limitations of the Corpus Iuris Civilis for recovering the history of Classical law. Indeed, for Herz, Roman law is a “dream of order” grounded in a reality that never existed (p. 295) and always constructed in retrospect (p. 300). That law may be unreal does not mean that it is irrelevant; on the contrary, it exerts a transformative power over the experience of imperial government. Roman law operates as a device of political representation: it produces narrative order and a sense of certainty exactly where the real world is “scary and nonsensical” (p. 13). This is the major thread of the volume, and the author illustrates it with sources of very different natures, consistently arguing that legality is, above all, a discursive practice.
The book is organized into three parts. The first covers the early Principate and the initial articulation of “imperial legality” down to Marcus Aurelius; the second examines the consolidation, crisis, and transformation of the rescript system under the Severan dynasty; the third addresses the rereading of classical law and its “domestication” within the major compilatory projects of Late Antiquity, with Justinian as the final and essential protagonist.
Chapter 1 opens the study examining the relationship between the consolidation of Augustus’ power and the notion of legality. Herz does so through four pieces of evidence: Horace’s Satire 2.1, the Augustan aureus bearing the legend leges et iura restituit (British Museum 1995,0401.1), the episode of Vedius Pollio, and the exile of Julia. Avoiding a strictly constitutionalist reading, what interests the author is how Augustus and his contemporaries use law to speak about power. The reading of the aureus of 28 BCE leads the reader to the key concept of “Augustan legality” (p. 54): a performative legality that presents the restoration of the republican order (that is, its leges et iura) as a voluntary gesture of the princeps. Law here functions as a metonymic symbol of a traditional order that Augustus controls and, at the same time, ultimately comes to embody. The episodes of Vedius Pollio and the exile of Julia reinforce this reading, as they reveal an Augustus who oscillates between the exercise of absolute personal power and the carefully staged representation of a willing servant of the law, even of the very law that he himself promotes. It is precisely this friction between legality and discretion (between the emperor‑as‑god and the emperor‑as‑bureaucrat, p. 72) that defines a good part of the Principate.
Chapter 2 examines narratives which develop the relationship between emperor and legality from Vespasian to Trajan, structuring the discussion around three key points: the lex de imperio Vespasiani, the edict of Titus, and Pliny the Younger’s Panegyricus to Trajan. The first two documents are read in light of these emperors’ need to establish a sense of continuity not grounded in blood ties—since this was a new dynasty (p. 92)—, but rather by a specific relationship between the princeps and the law: the “performative submission” (p. 75) created by Augustus. In this way, a canon begins to take shape, composed of emperors whose comportment toward the law was deemed correct and thus useful as legitimating precedent (p. 87); those who did not conform to this model form a negative counter‑tradition and are effectively excluded from this imperial legality (and, for that reason, from this chapter as well). Trajan, in Herz’s reading of the Panegyricus, fits into this canon. Pliny constructs an image of the emperor that distances him from tyranny (p. 108) and situates him squarely within this ideal pattern: a good princeps behaves as if legally constrained, even when he is not and should not be (p. 106).
Chapter 3 examines the growing centrality of the rescript system and the increasing complexity of the imperial legal apparatus from Hadrian onward. Herz emphasizes that, already in the second century CE, the emperor’s authority was expressed less through the creation of new norms than through the management of procedural expectations. The episode—fictional but revealing—of Hadrian hearing a woman’s petition exemplifies what the author terms “legal entitlement” (p. 111). To this Herz adds a reflection on the significance of the stabilization of the praetorian edict by Salvius Julianus. Although he remains skeptical about the transformative character of this process, he argues that the fossilization of the edict under Hadrian shifted the normative center of gravity from the magistracies to the emperor (p. 117). This change is reinforced by the simultaneous evolution in the relationship between emperor and jurists, through their incorporation into the consilium (p. 123). The combined effect of these two phenomena is decisive: after Hadrian, the emperor emerges as the main figure of legal authority, able to articulate, through the rescript system and his circle of experts, his own strategies of self‑representation (p. 132). As seen throughout, this performative dimension of legal activity constitutes one of the fundamental interpretative pillars of Herz’s thesis.
This idea is further developed in Chapter 4 (partially derived from Herz 2020)[6], which examines the process by which the emperor’s legal authority ceased to rest on a charismatic or personal foundation and instead acquired an institutional character—a development prompted by the experience of the child‑emperors who closed the Severan dynasty. Herz approaches the issue from two angles: first, the assimilation by Alexander Severus of rescripts that had in fact been issued by the chancery of his predecessor Elagabalus; and second, the striking tendency in Alexander Severus’ rescripts to employ precedential reasoning. Both strategies aim to reinforce the idea of an imperial regime that transcends the person of the emperor and, in doing so, contributed to stabilizing Alexander’s position (p. 160). At the dawn of the third century CE, the emperor is no longer presented as a charismatic sovereign but as a bureaucrat (or as the figurehead of a group of bureaucrats) whose authority derives from his ability to embody the continuity of the legal apparatus (p. 181). This development unfolds alongside the increasing presence of jurists within the upper organs of imperial power. Chapter 5 focuses on these figures and on how the nature of their works changes as their relationship with power grows closer: the densely argued treatises of earlier periods give way to repositories of rules and normative solutions whose authority stems from their proximity to the emperor, rendering extended argumentation unnecessary (p. 195). At the same time, he identifies a marked tendency among Severan jurists to employ “rule-consequentialism” in their reasoning, an orientation again consistent with their growing closeness to the center of imperial power (pp. 201–203).
Chapter 6 opens the final part of the volume, devoted to showing how Late Antiquity transformed the legacy of classical law. Herz begins by examining the reinterpretation of Roman law that emerges in the imperial projects following the so‑called “Third Century Crisis” in which the theoretical projections of the classical iusperiti became legally binding and transformative realities (p. 221). This is explored through four (although in the volume they are numbered as three, p. 221-222) case studies: Roman legal rhetoric between the third century and Constantine; the phenomenon of legal codification during the Tetrarchy, with the codices Gregorianus and Hermogenianus; the expansion of bureaucracy in the fourth century; and, finally, an analysis of the nature of the Codex Theodosianus. These developments allow Herz to reconstruct the transition towards an increasingly impersonal and positivist Roman legal system, sustained by clearer regulations and applied by a progressively more professionalized bureaucracy.
This itinerary ends with a Chapter 7 in which Herz insists that the coherence of the Digest is a Justinianic construct, not an inherent property of classical jurisprudence (p. 265). Justinian deliberately presents Roman law in these terms to reaffirm his own authority and charisma (p. 268), fueled by a profound megalomania (p. 291). Justinian’s prohibition against the use of any jurisprudence outside his Corpus renders Roman law a closed universe, homogenized more by omission than by addition. This process explains the difficulties involved in reconstructing the “storytelling projects” and styles of the different emperors of the classical period, although the effort, Herz argues, remains both necessary and worthwhile (p. 269). This book offers a compelling proof of that claim.
Herz concludes the book strengthening the central threads of his argument, underscoring the evocative power of Roman law. Writing about rules meant to impose order and justice in a world perceived as chaotic and violent could—he suggests—exert an almost therapeutic effect on ancient jurists and continued to do so for later scholars who found in Roman law an intellectual refuge, a space of certainty constructed precisely where reality could offer little of it. The volume ends with three appendices that systematize key aspects of the study: a compilation of the 1255 juristic citations of imperial lawmaking found in the Digest; a list of precedential reasoning in the Codex Iustinianus, directly connected to the discussion in Chapter 4; and an examination of rule‑consequentialist reasoning in the Digest, connected to Chapter 5. These are followed by two useful indexes of terms and sources, as well as a wide-ranging and balanced bibliography that reflects the two scholarly strands underpinning this work: the historical and the legal.
The God and the Bureaucrat is a work of great originality, written with a remarkable ability to connect sources under a single interpretative logic and undoubtedly with a voice of its own.[7] At times, that voice may strike the more traditional reader as unexpected, especially one unaccustomed to encountering informal analogies or light touches of humor in a study of such scholarly depth (I admit to having allowed myself a small chuckle at the note to Fig. 7.1). Yet these deft shifts in tone often succeed in drawing the reader in, sharpening rather than obscuring the argument, and they help, for instance, to convey the idea that a good emperor is like a good son who calls his mother every week without being obliged to do so (p. 106). There are moments in which one senses the work’s origins as a doctoral dissertation, particularly in the need to engage side debates, to include occasional redundant footnotes (the long n. 49 on pp. 126-127 seems somewhat unnecessary considering Appendix 1), or to linger on questions of terminological precision. For this last point, it is somewhat striking to find the terms “royal house” or “kingdom” (this last one as a translation of regnum in Ov. Fasti 6.643, p. 59) in a High Empire context, at odds with what is stated on p. 107. These are, of course, minor details that in no way obscure the brilliance of a book that should be required reading for all those who believe that one cannot write the history of Rome without its law, nor Roman law without its history.
Notes
[1] Corcoran, Simon (1996). The empire of the tetrarchs: imperial pronouncements and government, AD 284-324. Oxford University Press.
[2] Connolly, Serena Dawn (2010). Lives behind the laws: the world of the Codex Hermogenianus. Indiana University Press.
[3] Tuori, Kaius (2016). The emperor of law: the emergence of Roman imperial adjudication. Oxford University Press
[4] Kelly, Benjamin (2011). Petitions, litigation, and social control in Roman Egypt. Oxford University Press
[5] Bryen, Ari Z. (2013). Violence in Roman Egypt: a study in legal interpretation. Pennsylvania State University Press
[6] Herz, Zachary (2020). “Precedential reasoning and dynastic self-fashioning in the rescripts of Severus Alexander”. Historia, 69(1), 103-125. DOI: 10.25162/Historia-2020-0006.
[7] This voice may also be heard in his interview on a podcast: “The God and the Bureaucrat,” Ius Commune Podcast conducted by Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz; S03 E03, released February 25, 2026.