Law and Power : Agents of Social and Spatial Transformation in the Roman West

In the Roman world, landscapes became legal and institutional constructions, being the core of social, political, religious, and economic life. The Romans developed ambitious urban transformations, seeking to equate civic monumentality and legal status. The built environment becomes the axis of the legal, administrative, sacred, and economic system and the main element of dissemination of imperial ideology. This volume follows the modern trend of a multifaceted, composite, multi-layered Roman world, but at the same time reduces its complexity. It views ‘Roman’ not only in the sense of power politics, but also in a cultural context. It highlights ‘landscapes’ and puts into the shadow important administrative and legal structures, i.e., individuals viz. local and imperial members of the elites living in cities, which ran the Roman world.

Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz is a Maria Zambrano fellow at the University of the Basque Country. She has published extensively on Roman law and its maritime focus. She is the editor of two volumes, Roman law and Maritime Commerce (EUP 2022) and Seafaring and Mobility in the Late Antique Mediterranean (Bloomsbury 2022). She is also the author of one monograph Shipwrecks, Legal Landscapes and Mediterranean Paradigms: Gone under Sea (Brill 2022).

Antonio Lopez García is a lecturer of archaeology at the University of Granada. He is specialized in Roman archaeology and topography. As a field archaeologist, he has participated in numerous international projects in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom and directed two archaeological excavations in Spain.

Anthony Álvarez Melero, Ph.D. (2010), Université libre de Bruxelles-Universidad de Sevilla, is Associate professor at the Universidad de Sevilla. He has published monographs, papers and articles on Roman Imperial and social History.

Diego Romero Vera is a lecturer of archaeology at the University of Seville. He has completed his postdoctoral training at the Ausonius Centre of the University of Bordeau-Montaigne. His research has been mainly focusing on the urban evolution of the Roman cities in Iberia during Antonine Age and on the dynamism of these cities from the study of Epigraphical Sources.

Contributors are: Javier Herrera Rando, Cristina de la Escosura Balbás, David Espinosa Espinosa, Daniel León Ardoy, Francisco Cidoncha-Redondo, Daniel Becerra Fernández, Diego Romero Vera, Anna-Maria Wilskman, Sergio España-Chamorro.