INTRODUCTION

The study of Roman civil procedure has benefited enormously from the discovery of the Murecine archive, a collection of first-century documents belonging to a banking family in Puteoli. Lawyers and historians are indebted to Giuseppe Camodeca for his exceptional care in editing and presenting the archive and interpreting its contents. Opinions differ on questions of interpretation, but this is inevitable: the sources on procedure available to date have not adequately prepared us to interpret the Murecine archive. The literary sources tend to mention rules of procedure only in passing, and the juristic sources (to recall perhaps Watson's “law in books”) usually follow their own currents: the real and the hypothetical are mixed together, and what is interesting or contentious gets more attention than what, for Roman litigants, was routine and unremarkable. These are the sources that have shaped our views of procedure, and we have no prior assurance that they will fully explain the events described in the Murecine archive.

Some of the documents in the archive were prepared in the middle of litigation, and these are particularly rare and valuable. Yet identifying the “litigation documents” is more difficult than one might think. This is because, in Roman procedure, it is difficult to fix the moment at which the parties' acts cease to be “extra-judicial” (“outwith litigation”) and become “judicial”. Litigation ostensibly begins with a summons – and everything after that ought to be judicial – but the summons was a private act and did not necessarily lead to any real engagement between the parties (or even a meeting with the magistrate).