Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2010
This article discusses the probable aims and provisions of Mark Antony's judiciary law of September 44 B.C. and challenges the prevailing view that this law had no further existence after it was annulled by the Senate in January 43 B.C. Instead, it is demonstrated that Antony's law was almost certainly reinstated under the Triumvirs and thus radically altered the composition of juries in Rome's criminal courts. This realization makes it possible to reconstruct the likely nature and timing of Augustus' judicial reforms, which can now be regarded as measures designed to reverse major changes that had been introduced by Antony's legislation.
* Oral versions of this paper were delivered in January 2004 at the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association in San Francisco, in October at the University of Iowa, and during the Lent Term of 2005, when I was a visiting fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, at the University of Cambridge, the University of Leeds, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Edinburgh. I thank the members of those audiences, as well as the referees of JRS, for their many helpful suggestions, and I thank the following scholars for reading and commenting on earlier drafts: M. Alexander, E. Badian, B. Frier, A. MacGregor, G. Manuwald, C. B. R. Pelling, D. R. Shackleton Bailey, J. Tatum, M. Toher, P. G. Walsh, and A. Watson. They are, of course, not to be held responsible for the views expressed. Citations of works by Cicero are generally by title only; references having the form App. and Nic. Dam. are to Appian's Civil Wars and to Nicolaus of Damascus, Bios of Augustus, respectively.