ISSN 2291-9732 Law, Empire, and the Making of Roman Estates in the Provinces During the Late Republic Lisa Pilar Eberle * Abstract This paper studies the implication of law in the Roman imperial project. It uses the crea- tion of the legal framework for how Romans could acquire landholdings in the provinces of the Greek East in the second and first centuries BC as a case study in order to propose an alternative to the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy that characterizes prevailing ap- proaches. By tracing the different legal arenas in which this framework was developed— Roman jurisprudence, provincial edicts, the senate in Rome—and the different social groups that participated in developing this framework in these arenas—Romans in the provinces, the members of Greek cities there, and Rome’s political elite—this study re- veals law in the empire as a site of political debate, not between ruler and ruled, but between several competing groups that used law to shape and contest what the empire should mean for them. I. Introduction Standard narratives of Roman imperialism and law’s implication in it run roughly as fol- lows. Starting in the late third century BC, the Romans conquered many lands around the Mediterranean, which they consolidated into provinces, over which they then ruled. In some areas, above all in the Western part of the empire, this entailed the establishment of dispute resolution mechanisms, which they imagined as part of a larger project of pacifica- tion and civilization. In the Greek East, by contrast, the Romans limited themselves to asserting direct authority over criminal law, leaving local institutions of dispute resolution and legislative authority intact. Leaving aside these regional differences and particularities, they were generally keen to effect legal change concerning fiscal and administrative mat- ters. Local systems of private law only became an object of concern for Roman jurists in the second century AD, when they wrote commentaries on the standardized edict of pro- vincial governors or tackled conflict of law problems. 1 * Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford. Thanks are due to all the participants in the workshop at the University of Chicago, in particular to Cliff Ando for organizing it and for his thoughtful comments on a previous version of this paper. I am also grateful to Eric Driscoll for helpful suggestions in the final stages of the project. Citations of ancient sources other than the Corpus Iuris Civilis and Gaius’s Institutes follow the standards provided in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (ancient authors) and in the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (inscriptions). 1 For recent iterations of this story, see e.g., Caroline Humfress, Law and Custom Under Rome, in Law, Custom and Justice in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages 23, 35 (Alice Rio ed., 2011); Cédric Brélaz,