Conclusion

Summary

In China, in the nineteenth century, charms in the countryside invoking the help of the gods frequently employed the physical form and formulae of bureaucratic orders issued by the imperial government, complete with phrases used in official decrees and Chinese characters of command at the top, all written on yellow paper (the imperial color) in cinnibar ink (a red that signalled a decree's authenticity), and marked with an official seal. In a bureaucratic empire – very intensely governed, by Roman standards – it was efficacious to compel even the supernatural with the external forms utilized by the bureaucracy. The puzzle the Romans present is the reverse of this: in an empire with hardly any machinery of enforcement – a handful of officials, a minute bureaucracy, no real police – how could law have force? How can law have any power in the absence of the rule of law?

To be effective Roman law initially drew its authority from outside government and outside itself, from the wider world of belief in which it was embedded. Interpretations of early Roman law as in some way “magical” are therefore not as wrongheaded as their critics have thought. For magic and law travel the same road (indeed, a wide road, travelled also by religious and other acts), aim at many of the same ends, and use many of the same techniques.