Elizabeth A. Meyer Libri

Exploring the historical significance of wooden tablets used by Romans for writing, this book delves into their role in legal and public documentation. It highlights how these tablets contributed to the Romanization of provinces and shaped the evolution of Roman law. Elizabeth Meyer emphasizes their lasting influence as precursors to modern legal documents, illustrating how Roman law derived its authority from a broader belief system in a time when legal knowledge was limited.

Molossia is perhaps most famous as the kingdom of the third-century warlord Pyrrhus. The Inscriptions of Dodona and A New History of Molossia re-examines the non-oracular stone and bronze inscriptions, re-dating some of the most important to the third century BC rather than the fourth. This re-dating in turn forms the basis of the new history presented here. In this history are stressed the primacy of the king, who ruled a kingdom rather than a federal league; the minimal extent of Molossian „expansion“ in the fourth century BC; the likelihood that there was indeed no federal league, only a type of amphictyony administering the sanctuary of Dodona, before 232 BC; the continuing relationship of allied association rather than incorporation between the Molossians with their neighbors; the interference of the Macedonians as a catalyst for the coalescence of Molossian identity; and the way events of the third century paved the way for the establishment of a federal league after the death of the last monarch in 232 BC. This history substantially reshapes our understanding of this part of the Hellenistic world, and of the early history of federal leagues in Greece.

Beneath the shining world of Classical Athens lay the perilous realm of the metic, a resident foreigner. A defining aspect of their status was the obligation to pay a special metic tax, the metoikion. Failure to pay this tax could lead to enslavement, a fate not faced by citizens. In the late fourth century BC, as economic recession prompted many metics to leave Athens, legal reforms were introduced to improve their situation and encourage their return. This volume explores the context of these reforms, arguing that a notable set of fourth-century BC Athenian inscriptions, known as the "Attic Manumissions," is linked to this period. Traditionally thought to document the freeing of slaves, these inscriptions are published here as a corpus for the first time. The argument presented is that they actually record prosecutions of metics for failing to pay the metoikion. In the pro-metic climate of the 330s BC, individuals who sued metics without securing a conviction faced fines to deter frivolous lawsuits, with part of these fines dedicated to divinity in the form of a phiale.