Iniustitia in Transition: Jurisdiction of Roman Provincial Governors from Cicero to Pliny the Younger

Dissertationsprojekt von Weixia Wang

Betreuer: Prof. Dr. John Weisweiler

This dissertation examines the transformation of Roman provincial governance from the Late Republic to the Early Principate through the lens of gubernatorial jurisdiction. Drawing on Cicero's correspondence during his Cilician governorship (51–50 BC) and Pliny the Younger's administrative letters from Pontus-Bithynia (c. 110–112 AD), the study traces how the mechanisms producing iniustitia (injustice) in provincial rule underwent a fundamental structural shift.

Modern scholarship, most influentially P. A. Brunt, has framed Roman provincial administration around whether imperial rule improved conditions for provincial subjects. This study departs from such quantitative assessments, treating iniustitia as a structural category: the systemic friction generated when gubernatorial discretion interacts with local power configurations. The central argument holds that similar manifestations of injustice may arise from radically different juridical logics. Under the Republic, gubernatorial jurisdiction was embedded in personal authority, elite amicitia, and competitive aristocratic norms; injustice emerged from the tension between personal discretion and collective expectation. Under the Principate, injustice increasingly took procedural form, produced within mechanisms designed to ensure justice itself. Certain forms of imperial iniustitia emerged precisely from the successful operation of new administrative procedures, as governors sacrificed substantive judgment for institutional compliance.

The study operationalizes this through a typology of personalized exploitation versus procedural extraction. Republican iniustitia was predatory, visible, and attributable to individuals — exemplified by Verres's plunder of Sicily and Brutus's violent debt collection through Scaptius. Imperial iniustitia was conservative, diffuse, and embedded in systematic operation — exemplified by Pliny's suppression of fire brigades and his punishment of Christians for contumacia rather than substantive offense.

Methodologically, the project treats both letter corpora as constructed representations of gubernatorial authority, informed by Hölkeskamp's Theater der Macht framework and Anglophone scholarship on literary evidence. The comparison focuses on how each governor represented judicial practice within his letters, mapping the shift from horizontal aristocratic negotiation to vertical bureaucratic referral as the defining trajectory of Roman provincial jurisdiction.