Ari Z. Bryen

Dissertation: "Violence, Law, and Society in Roman and Late Antique Egypt"

This project combines documentary, literary, and legal sources to trace the rise of legal consciousness in the provinces of the Roman Empire and the effects of that consciousness on imperial governance in the first through fourth centuries. Provincial populations were politically invested in, and told stories about, the nature of imperial law. In these stories they re-imagined law not as a transcendent system or as mere imperatives, but as a practical activity of problem-solving in which imperial administrators ideally recognized local claims to right. In articulating these understandings before provincial governors and in their various public discourses, they set in motion institutional processes that contributed to the creation of a rule of law.