Editor's note: early in the life of this blog we attempted to provide a famous quotation from legal history, sometimes with extensive commentary and historical perspective (see here) in a piece entitled "Legal Quote of the Week." It's been somewhat more than a week since the last such piece, but we will be making efforts in the next few months to continue this feature on a regular (if not weekly) basis.
We're so damned busy, we've got an enormous backlog of old lawsuits not dealt with. They've been stacked there so long, they've fallen apart with mildew and they're covered in spider's webs. I'm thinking in particular about the ones taken out against certain individuals associated with the intellectual arts and crafts. Some of them are absolutely ancient. The litigants themselves are bawling on every side, grinding their teeth, calling for justice and accusing me of tardiness. What they don't realize is that it's not through contempt that these decisions have passed their sell-by date. It's because of the state of bliss that they think we live in. That's the name they give to our complete lack of spare time.
-The god Zeus, complaining about his backlog of cases and the impatience of litigants, in Lucian of Samosata's satirical piece Bis Accusatus ("Twice Accused").
As Ari Bryen notes in "Judging Empire: Courts and Culture in Rome's Eastern Provinces,"[1] Lucian was satirizing the governance of the Roman Empire by comparing the gods to the state's bureaucrats and jurists. His play gives us a fascinating look at the frustration of common citizens faced with the slowly-turning wheels of justice, a sentiment readily comprehensible by many modern litigants:
The story could be dismissed by modern scholars as a merely satiric picture, if not for the existence of a roughly contemporaneous papyrus accidentally preserved in the sands of the Egyptian city of Arsinoe which records the governor of Egypt (a Roman province since 30 BCE) hearing a total of 1,804 individual petitions from the surrounding region over a three-day period in 209 CE. Naphtali Lewis has done the math: if we posit the governor hearing all of these complaints within a ten-hour workday, petitions would be handled at the rate roughly one per minute. Even with his staff helping to alleviate the burden, this was hardly divine justice.
The satire of Lucian and the papyrus from Egypt both speak to a common theme: the importance of courts in the culture of the Roman provinces, and similarly, in the Roman provincial imagination. To judge from the varied, variably preserved evidence from Rome’s eastern (that is, Greek-speaking) provinces—a swath of land stretching from what is now Greece and the former Yugoslavia eastwards across the Bosporus into Turkey and the Middle East, and then back westward to include Egypt and parts of Libya—a significant number of individuals would be involved in a court case at some point in their lives. Courts appear, inter alia, in curse tablets in which people ask the gods to cripple their opponents and tie their tongues on the day of an approaching lawsuit, in oracular responses that predict court victories or in oracular questions in which individuals ask whether or not they should sue someone, in personal letters preserved on papyrus, in official and unofficial inscriptions, and in literary texts, most notably (but far from exclusively), the New Testament and the early Christian martyr narratives. In some cases court days were fantastic affairs in which spectators and allies from far and away converged on a central location to watch a trial (and yell, heckle, laugh, snicker, and otherwise seek to influence the proceedings in support of their favorite); the other cases—by far the great majority—were mundane affairs of paper pushing, a mind-numbing hassle of waiting for opponents who might or might not appear to answer the charges against them, and of traveling from point to point to pursue the decisions of a series of differently-ranked magistrates who, if they heard the complaint in the first place, would most likely make an underwhelming decision by means of a six-letter subscription to a written complaint: apodos, in Greek, that is, pass it on to the next person up or down the chain of command, and let him deal with it.
[1] Ari Z. Bryen, "Judging Empire: Courts and Culture in Rome's Eastern Provinces," Law and History Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (August 2012).