Lex Plaetoria Explained

In Roman law, a Lex Plaetoria is a law (lex) introduced by someone with the family name Plaetorius.

Lex Plaetoria de iurisdictione

The Lex Plaetoria de iurisdictione (after 242 BC, but before 200 BC)^[1] was introduced as a plebiscite (plebiscitum) by the tribune M. Plaetorius.^[2] The law is significant in the history of the praetorship, but the textual difficulties of the passage in which it is most fully described leave room for varying interpretation. The law required the urban praetor to make himself available to administer justice for the people (populus), probably in the Comitium, all day, until dusk.^[3] It is assumed to have redefined the duties of the praetor as established by the Twelve Tables, perhaps because of the recent creation of the praetor peregrinus. It specifies that the praeter urbanus administered justice inter cives, "among citizens," in contrast to the praetor inter peregrinos, among foreigners. This assumption dates the Lex Plaetoria to 242 BC or after, but the dating is problematic because the Plaetorii are not known to have been prominent in public life until after 200.^[4] The law also provided the urban praetor with two lictors while he was exercising his jurisdiction.^[5]

Lex Plaetoria de minoribus

The Lex Plaetoria de minoribus (192–191 BC) protected legal minors. If someone under age 25 entered into a legal transaction contrary to his own interests, it authorized a praetor to grant a restitutio in integrum, a legal remedy for a person who had suffered an unjust loss because of an overly strict application of law. The legal position of both parties was restored to their standing before the contested litigation, but as a matter of civil law (ius civile), the transaction itself was not reversed.^[6]

Lex Plaetoria on altars

A Lex Plaetoria (mid-2nd century BC) is known from two inscriptions^[7] commemorating the refurbishing of altars^[8] by an Aulus Postumius Albinus, identified as a duovir^[9] and possibly the consul of 180 BC (censor 173 BC).^[10] The law seems to have been passed specifically to authorize Postumius Albinus to undertake these two projects, and was not necessarily aimed at legislating religious dedications in general,^[11] though religious revivalism was characteristic of the period as a response to the Second Punic War.^[12]

Notes and References

1. J.A. Crook, "The Development of Roman Private Law," in Cambridge Ancient History IX: The Last Age of the Roman Republic 146–43 B.C. (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 561; Fergus Millar, "Political Power in Mid-Republican Rome: Curia or Comitium?" Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989), p. 145.
2. [Censorinus]
3. [Varro]
4. [T. Corey Brennan]
5. Daniel J. Gargola, Lands, Laws, and Gods: Magistrates and Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican Rome (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 226.
6. George Mousourakis, The Historical and Institutional Context of Roman Law (Ashgate, 2003), p. 219.
7. Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei Publicae 121 and 281.
8. One altar was located in the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina in the southern Campus Martius, and was dedicated to an unidentified god, and the other was an altar to Verminus, god of cattle disease, found north of the Porta Viminalis along the Servian Wall; Richardson, Topographical Dictionary, pp. 34, 411.
9. Lawrence Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) p. 34; Eric M. Orlin, Temples, Religion, and Politics in the Roman Republic (Brill, 1997), pp. 171–172.
10. Orlin, Temples, Religion and Politics, p. 172.
11. Orlin, Temples, Religion and Politics, p. 172.
12. [Elizabeth Rawson]