16 X Zachary Herz (University of Colorado Boulder): A Fetid Jungle of Laws. The Organization of Imperial Rescripts, 160–534 C.E.

Modern readers experience imperial constitutions through vast multiauthor compilations like the Codices Justinianus et Theodosianus. These compilations organize the writings of many different people by subject matter, and thus present those writings as if their subject were more important than their author. This idea springs up late in the history of Roman legal writing, and is not adopted by central archivists until the tetrarchy; before then, researchers looking for imperial writing on a given topic faced less manageable archives organized around more traditional epistolary conventions. This talk shows how imperial writing got to be this way, and argues that these changes in indexing and archival practice reflect broader shifts in the relationship between emperors, bureaucrats, and law over the first through fifth centuries C.E.