Provenance and location

Ancient city: Amorgos
Modern city: Amorgos (Greece)
Province: Insulae
Diocese: Asiana
Regional prefecture: Oriens
Provenance: two fragments (a-b) found in August 1841 at Minoa, the harbour of Amorgos
Current location (a): Athens, Epigraphic Museum, inv. EM 10401
Current location (b): lost
Ancient location: public space

Type and material of the support and text layout

Text category

legislative inscription

Latin text

Critical edition

Correct orthography:

a.2: oboriri; nonnull[ae]
a.3: controversiae quae
a.6: quaedam
a.7: quibus
a.9: provinciae; nobis
a.10: utrumque pendentibus
a.12: hoc est
a.13: humiliora
a.15: praesidibus
a.16: sibi
a.17: curarum ipsi
a.17-18: dempserint
a.18: nihilominus
a.19: hoc
a.19-20: administrabunt
a.20: cum
a.21: administrent
a.22: cuius
a.23: atque
a.26: atque

For the critical apparatus see Feissel 2000, pp. 211-212.

Translations

English

Fr. a (Salway 2012, pp. 148-150): “A copy of the imperial letter. – Not a few controversies are accustomed to arise that required the attention and scrutiny of a higher judge, but there are still some matters in which it is superfluous to wait for the governor of the province. Weighing which matter up, it has seemed quite right to us that we should give governors the power to establish subordinate judges, that is, those who decide more humble matters. For thus they will be both relieved of a part of their responsibilities and yet will still be carrying out this obligation when those whom they select carry it out. Conscious (?) of which matter ... we decree that your excellence, Secundus, most dear and beloved relative ...”

French

Fr. a (Feissel 2000, p. 324 = 2010a, p. 212): “Copie de la lettre impériale. — Certaines controverses ont coutume de naître qui demandent à être connues et examinées par un juge de haut niveau, mais il est des affaires dans lesquelles il est superflu d’attendre le gouverneur de la province. En balançant le pour et le contre, il nous a paru tout à fait juste de donner aux gouverneurs le pouvoir d’établir des juges subalternes, c’est-à-dire qui aient à trancher les affaires de niveau inférieur. Ainsi en effet (les gouverneurs) eux-mêmes se seront enlevé une part de leurs occupations, et néanmoins ce sera comme si eux-mêmes exerçaient cette fonction du moment que l’exercent ceux qu’ils ont choisis. Conscients (?) de quoi nous décrétons que ton ... et éminente Excellence, Secundus notre parent très cher et très aimé ...”

Italian

Fr. a: “Copia delle sacre lettere. – Sono solite sorgere alcune controversie che richiedono la cognizione e l’esame da parte di un giudice di grado superiore, ma vi sono certe cause per le quali è superfluo attendere il governatore della provincia. Valutando la questione, ci è parso oltre modo giusto dare ai governatori il potere di nominare giudici subalterni, vale a dire coloro che giudicano le cause minori. Così infatti gli stessi (governatori) saranno sollevati da una parte di queste cause e tuttavia sarà come se questi, nondimeno, amministrassero tale funzione, poiché l’amministrano coloro che essi hanno delegato. Consapevoli (?) di ciò decretiamo che ... l’eminente Eccellenza tua, o Secundus padre carissimo e amatissimo ...”

The inscription and its prefects: critical commentary, updating, overviews

The two marble slabs were discovered by L. Ross in August 1841 on the site of ancient Minoa, in Amorgos, the easternmost island of the Cyclades in Greece (Ross 1843, p. 42). While the second stone has been lost, the first block is now kept in the Epigraphic Museum of Athens. It preserves twenty-six lines of the Latin text, but there was at least one more – now fragmentary – at the bottom (Feissel 2000 = 2010a, pp. 216-219). The second stone is more problematic. It once bore a Latin text which is known only from the incomplete transcription made by Ross, who copied the left side of the first sixteen lines. The quality of the inscription in the first block is rather mediocre. While some mistakes are due to the phonetic phenomena typical of late Latin, others are purely graphic to the extent that in some places the text is almost unintelligible (cf. Feissel 2010a, p. 209; Salway 2012, p. 148; see below). According to the transcription of Ross the writing on the second block also had similar characteristics. The two stones were part of the same dossier and were edited and commented together by Mommsen (CIL 03, 00459 A-B; cf. CIL 03/2, p. 982; CIL 03, Suppl.2, 14199,2). After a revision of the text of the first stone by Michaux (1955), D. Feissel has published a new edition with a critical commentary which is now the standard text (Feissel 2000 = 2010a).

The inscription records a constitution of the emperor Julian that is addressed to the praetorian prefect of the East Saturninius Secundus Salutius and that deals with the administration of justice (on Salutius see also PPRET 50, 51, 52). The law, which takes up the whole first block and ll. 1-4 of the second one, grants the governors the power to appoint petty judges (iudices pedanei) to try the less important cases. The emperor declares that this provision will relieve the burden on the governors, without undermining the authority of the judgments, because the delegates will be nominated by the governors themselves (it is unclear how this regulation differs from previous legislation on the matter: cf. Schiavo 2009, pp. 391-415; Liva 2012, pp. 36-39; Brendel 2017, pp. 91-95; Schmidt-Hofner 2020, pp. 150-151; the text of the earlier laws on the subject, preserved only in the Justinian Code, may have been substantially altered by the compilers in the 6th Century). Despite being fragmented, in the last part of the constitution the name of the recipient of the imperial letter, «Secunde parens carissime adque amantissime», our praetorian prefect, can be easily detected.

This law was included in the Theodosian and Justinian Codes (CTh 01, 16, 08 = CI 03, 03, 05) and the epigraphic copy offers an almost unique opportunity to compare the edited form in the collections with a text closer to the original constitution (cf. Feissel 2010a, pp. 220-222; Salway 2012, p. 150; Brendel 2017, pp. 87-91; the only other 4th Century law to have survived in both forms is the so-called Edictum de accusationibus: see Corcoran 2007; cf. Feissel 2010b, pp. 123, 146-150; Feissel 2010c, pp. 179-184; Matthews 2000, pp. 254-270; see now the inscription found at Anaia with the Greek translation of a constitution by Valentinianus II, preserved also in the Theodosian Code = PPRET 81). The Theodosian compilers saved only two statements, corresponding to ll. 6-9 («quedam … provinciae») and ll. 12-16 («pedaneos … potestatem»), with minor amendments, and left out a portion of the opening sentence and the second part of the constitution. Conversely, the copy in the Codes has the protocols that are missing in the inscription and these allow us to identify both the author and the recipient («the Emperor Julian to Secundus praetorian prefect») and to know the date and place of issue of the law («issued on July 28^th 362 at Antioch»; the subscriptio survives only in the Justinian copy: see Salway 2012, p. 156, ntt. 85-86).

The first block of Amorgos bears the heading E S L, which stands for E(xemplum) S(acrararum) L(itterarum), «Copy of the Sacred Letters». This formulation, extant in only three other epigraphic documents of the 4th Century (including PPRET 28; cf. Corcoran 2008), proves that the text was not copied from an original document of the imperial chancellery, but from an official copy. The constitution, in the form of a letter (epistula), was addressed by the emperor to the praetorian prefect Secundus Salutius, who then re-transmitted it to the provincial governors of the eastern prefecture, including the governor of the Province of the Islands (without the intervention of the vicar of Asia, who had no power on this province: see Feissel 1998, pp. 92-94; cf. Feissel 2009, p. 301), where Amorgos is located. Since the governor sat in Rhodes, it is likely that the text of Amorgos is a further copy of the letter sent by the prefect (Feissel 2010a, p. 216).

The dissemination of the imperial constitutions in Late Antiquity was one of the main tasks of the praetorian prefecture. The first evidence of this practice dates back to the beginning of the 4th Century, when the prefect was still an official at court. It greatly increases with the regionalization of the prefecture and the transformation of the prefect into the head of the civil administration (see Porena 2003, pp. 214-237). The constitutions transmitted to the provinces were followed by an edict of promulgation by the prefect which was usually limited to providing a summary of the imperial disposition and instructing the governors to publicize the text (cf. some examples gathered in Goria-Sitzia 2013: nrr. B 1, C 2-3, 5, 7, 9). Probably this is what follows the law of Julian in the inscription of Amorgos: at l. 5 of the second block a new text begins, introduced by the letters «EX» that refer to the copy (exemplum) of an official document. This is not another imperial constitution, because from Ross’ transcription, albeit problematic, it is still possible to reconstruct an imperial titulature in the dative (ll. 6-8); the words «pedanei iudices» at ll. 10-11, a reference to the content of the constitution, suggest that this is the letter of an official whose duty it was to convey the imperial law. We cannot rule out the possibility of an edict of the governor, but since the hierarchy would have given precedence to the prefect, it is more likely that these are the remains of the edict of Secundus Salutius.

This is even hinted at in the text itself. As we have already said, the Amorgos copy of the imperial constitution is in some places almost unintelligible, due to the many spelling mistakes that appear after the constitution also in the text on the second block. According to Salway (2012, p. 148), the law of Julian was subjected to two layers of distortion: first, mistakes arising from phonetic transcription (as simple E for AE: e.g., l. 3 controversie, l. 9, provincie; or V for B: l. 15, presidivus); second, the engraver probably had no real command of Latin and simply tried to reproduce mechanically the facsimile of the half uncial text in front of him, but inserted further mistakes in the document (he indiscriminately reproduced the Greek Rho for the Latin letters P and R: e.g., l. 2 ovopipi for oboriri, l. 3 contpovepsie, for controversiae and so on). As a consequence, the resulting text is not easy to grasp. Such a problematic publication suggests that a Greek edict of the governor of the Islands, summarizing the main lines of the preceding Latin documents, was published together with them: a tripartite dossier, in which the imperial letter was followed by the edict of the prefect (in Latin) and that of the governor (in Greek). The remains of a dossier of this kind, which is almost contemporary, has been found on the nearby island of Kos, where a law of Valens was published followed by an edict of the praetorian prefect and a Greek edict of the governor. Only the Greek edict survived, but its text explicitly confirms this order of publication (see Feissel 2009, pp. 297-314; for a possible governor’s edict in Greek, see PPRET 88).

Another epigraphic copy of the law on iudices pedanei was found in Mytilene (CIL 03, 14198; Feissel 2000 = 2010a, p. 212; Brendel 2017, p. 89), on the island of Lesbos, located in the same Province of the Islands. Of course, this does not mean that the constitution concerned only these territories. There is, in fact, no reference in the text to any geographical restrictions in its application and the address to the praetorian prefect shows that the constitution was valid, at least, for the entire prefecture of the East. The recovery of the two unique testimonies in a single province can be explained by considering, together with the casualness of the epigraphic findings, the tradition these territories had of engraving official documents on stone (cf. Feissel 2009, for two near contemporary constitutions from Kos; possibly from the same period, the several census inscriptions discovered in the provinces of the Islands and of Asia: see Harper 2008, pp. 84-90). We also know that the degree of dissemination of imperial constitutions often depended upon the zeal of individual governors. A clear example of this phenomenon is given by the most famous epigraphic document of Late Antiquity, the Edict of Prices of Diocletian, countless copies of which were found in only a few provinces (see Giacchero 1974, pp. 35-86; Crawford, Reynolds 1975; Feissel 2010b, pp. 137-139; Corcoran 2000, pp. 229-232; cf. Salway 2012, pp. 148-150). It is therefore possible that the presence of multiple copies of the law of Julian in the Province of the Islands depends more on the scrupulousness of the governor in that period (perhaps Aedesius 4, PLRE I, p. 15, or Plutarchus 4, PLRE I, p. 708), rather than a specific relationship between the content of the law and these territories.

The recipient of Julian’s constitution, Saturninius Secundus Salutius, was Praetorian Prefect of the East from 361 AD to 367 AD, with a short interval under Valens (on his career, see PPRET 51; on his prefecture under Julian cf. especially PPRET 50). In the epigraphic text, as in all the constitutions addressed to him in the Theodosian and Justinian Codes, the prefect is called only Secundus (see Schmidt-Hofner 2008; Brendel 2017, pp. 403-407; cf. PPRET 52). But the inscription of Amorgos also preserves the phrase «parens carissime atque amantissime» (ll. 25-27), dearest and most beloved Father, with which the emperor greeted the prefect directly (cf. PPRET 56, l. 18: Probe parens carissime adq(ue) amantissime; PPRET 28, l.8, Philippus described by Constantius II as parens amicusque noster; see also CTh 11, 01, 06). This phrase was reserved for the higher officials of the Later Roman Empire, i.e. praetorian prefects, urban prefects and generals, while the lower grades are addressed in the constitution simply as frater amantissime, most beloved brother. Less common is the use of «excellentia» (ll. 24-25, preceded by the epithet eminens) in the 4th Century: the few examples in the law Codes are often related to the praetorian prefects but variants such as celsitudo, magnificentia / magnitudo, sublimitas were preferred (Fridh 1956, pp. 174-183).

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Praetorian prefects and epigraphic habit