Ancient/Classical History

Classicist explores fantasy of law in an empire of violence

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:23:34 +0000

Classicist explores fantasy of law in an empire of violence Rachel Sauer Tue, 01/06/2026 - 14:23

Cody DeBos

In new book, CU ��ý�� classics Professor Zach Herz focuses on the law, the bureaucrat and the Roman Empire

When Zach Herz talks about Roman law, he says things like, “Maybe the biggest misconception is that the Roman Empire had the rule of law.”

The idea might surprise those unfamiliar with the legal timeline of the world’s most famous empire. But Herz and other legal scholars who study the period know there is truth behind this confounding theory.

Herz, an assistant professor of classics at the ��ý�� and trained attorney, explores the idea further in his newly published book, The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories. In it, he questions the long-standing assumption that Roman law was a systematic, even apolitical legal achievement.

Zach Herz, a CU ��ý�� assistant professor of classics, recently published The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories, in which he questions the long-standing assumption that Roman law was a systematic, even apolitical legal achievement.

Instead, beneath a layer of dry humor and self-awareness, Herz argues that the bureaucracy of Roman law functioned as a fantasy constructed to impose a sense of order on a world that was anything but ordered.

What we get wrong about Rome’s judicial system

Modern historians often describe Rome as a pristine model of legality adorned in tunics and stonework, the purest version of legal order and one that has persisted as long as its ideals.

“What I think happened is Romans lived in this world that was autocratic and violent and very scary,” Herz says. “Different people thought about this in different ways. For some, the thing they needed to do was think very hard about law.”

Viewing their ideas in an unblemished light ignores the political reality that existed throughout much of the Roman Empire. Emperors held unchecked power, assassinations were common and violence permeated daily life.

So, how did a society plagued by these problems end up producing one of the most detailed legal traditions in world history?

“The Romans were trying to imagine how a fairer state might be run. This exercise generated these massive tomes about how problems should be solved. Everyone who read them knew it wasn’t how problems were actually solved. So this thing we now see as perfect law coming from a perfect world was actually people in a very imperfect world imagining a perfect law,” Herz explains.

In other words, Roman law helped people imagine a world where the state operated predictably and justly—even if their lived experience told them otherwise.

Bureaucracy as comfort, law as theater

The illusion of a fair legal system in Rome was an important political tool. It helped stabilize Rome by giving people a language for justice and a sense they could navigate the state by rules, not whims.

In a world without modern civil institutions, that illusion was valuable. But even in today’s world, it’s still valuable, Herz argues.

“Law still does a lot of work in making our lives better by allowing us to just not think about things so much. It allows us to put certain possibilities of violence or extreme tragedy out of our minds so we can focus on the things we enjoy,” he says.

Roman law, in Herz’s view, was more about storytelling, allowing people to imagine what ethical government might look like, especially when the emperor—who held unchecked power—was corrupt, disinterested or 12 years old.

CU ��ý�� scholar Zach Herz argues that the bureaucracy of Roman law functioned as a fantasy constructed to impose a sense of order on a world that was anything but ordered.

“It's clear that Romans wanted to believe there were checks and balances. And in some ways, there were. There was a remedy for having a bad emperor, right? It was a knife,” Herz says.

“A lot of our legal sources come from a particularly turbulent period in Roman history, early third century. It's called the Severan period. And I don't think that's a coincidence. We see law moved to the center of Roman political culture when the emperor is an obviously ‘good’ guy. I'm not saying everyone agrees with that, I'm not saying it's true, but that's sort of how everything is represented,” he adds.

Known as the Pax Romana (Roman Peace), this second-century CE period is remembered for a stretch of “Five Good Emperors.” With a trusted leader in power, the legal system was not often on the minds of the populace.

But when a bad emperor took the throne, that narrative changed quickly.

“If everyone agrees the emperor is good, we don’t have a problem. He is going to be ethical. There are going to be checks and balances. It's when the emperor is bad, now you need rules,” Herz says.

When the emperor cites precedent

One case study in Herz’s book tracks how legal rhetoric changed under child emperors, of which Rome had several. Drawing on techniques he learned during a stint in a corporate law firm, Herz noticed something curious.

“Cites to precedent are pretty rare in imperial decision-making because you're the emperor. But they showed up a lot more when the emperor was a child,” he says.

One boy emperor from the Severan period was four times more likely to cite prior decisions than adult emperors. Herz argues this was a strategic effort by Roman officials to borrow credibility from past rulings.

“It was a way to say, ‘Even though the emperor is a kid, the system still works,’” he explains.

That system, of course, was fragile. Even so, its stories of order held power.

“If the emperor is 12, you do not want a 12-year-old boy making decisions for you. You’d rather have lawyers doing that. You’d rather have statues doing that. You’d rather have coherent prospective guidance than whims, right? So, people decided to lean into the legal system,” Herz says.

Vestiges of the past

Although the Roman Empire is long gone, its influence endures in ways that we can see traces of throughout the modern world. In fact, most of continental Europe still bases its legal codes on Roman foundations. Even Louisiana maintains vestiges of Roman law.

“It was that or witches,” Herz quips. “They built their own laws on that imagined Roman Empire because that’s just what they had to work with.”

More importantly, Herz argues that we’ve inherited the Roman idea that states ought to operate through law. From Rome, we came to believe that legitimacy comes from procedure and precedent.

“Even in places that don’t explicitly follow Roman law, those notions are still deeply, deeply classical,” he says.

"Law still does a lot of work in making our lives better by allowing us to just not think about things so much. It allows us to put certain possibilities of violence or extreme tragedy out of our minds so we can focus on the things we enjoy."

That belief can be comforting, but also misleading, Herz says. As in Rome, modern legal systems can sometimes obscure violence, exclusion or inequality under layers of ritualized language and illusory checks and balances.

Imagined order, real impact

So, what can we gain by not upholding Roman law as a perfect blueprint, but instead treating it as a cultural artifact? For Herz, the answer is a better way to understand the interplay between power and imagination in human society.

“A huge amount of what law does is create this mirage of order. And it's backed up by force in unpredictable and confusing ways, if you really want to get into it,” he says.

Despite that ambiguity, Herz doesn’t see law as sinister. Nor does he see Rome’s imagined structures for a utopian world as malevolent. He believes it is human.

Our instinct for structure and fairness drive us to create something bigger than ourselves to believe in.

“You don’t have to think something totally real to think it’s incredibly useful. For most of us, the lives we want to make for ourselves don't require us to get into deep thinking about violence or crime and law prevents us from having to get into it. That's a very important gift that law gives to us,” he says.

For Herz, what makes Roman law worth studying is not that it worked inherently, but that it worked because people wanted it to.

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In new book, CU ��ý�� classics Professor Zach Herz focuses on the law, the bureaucrat and the Roman Empire.

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Grooves in a sandstone cliff reveal ancient tool sharpening

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 21:11:10 +0000

Grooves in a sandstone cliff reveal ancient tool sharpening Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/21/2024 - 14:11

Jeff Mitton

By rubbing a spear head against stone to form or sharpen it, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel

Comb Ridge is a monocline spanning between southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona—a formation 80 miles long with a north-south orientation, rising gradually on the eastern side and dropping precipitously 600 feet on the western side. It is an immense and magnificent structure and it has truly ancient Native American history, including the discovery of an intact Clovis Point spearhead and a petroglyph of a mammoth—both of which date to 13,000 years ago.

In addition, it is home to Ancestral Puebloan dwellings that were occupied from 1150 to about 1290 AD. In 1990, teachers discovered a large petroglyph panel at Comb Ridge that is now called the Procession Panel. Near the Procession Panel, I found something that I did not understand.

At the top of the page: Comb Ridge during the later hours of the afternoon. Above: The Procession Panel depicts 179 people converging at a kiva, a space dedicated to rites and political meetings. Images by Jeff Mitton.

Monarch Cave is an Ancestral Puebloan dwelling in a large alcove at the end of a canyon, beside an intermittent waterfall and high above a splash pool. The structures have some intact walls, and the cooking area is littered with small corn cobs. Several metate depressions were formed in the floor by grinding corn with a small rock called a mano. The ceiling is darkened with the smoke of cooking fires and a nearby wall is stained with the activity of tanning leather.

The two approaches to the alcove are very narrow, so the site was easily defended. Monarch Cave was occupied from 1150 to 1290 AD, when most of the people in the Four Corners area abandoned their ancestral homeland due to drought and famine.

The Procession Panel, above Monarch Cave and farther west, decorates a vertical red rock wall that catches sunlight late in the day. It is 15 feet long, and it depicts 179 people coming from three directions to converge at a kiva, a meeting place with spiritual significance.

Monarch Cave is an Ancestral Puebloan dwelling on Comb Ridge. Image by Jeff Mitton.

Two of the people wear bird headdresses, and several others are carrying hooked staffs, indicating that they are chiefs. Animals include bighorn sheep, deer, snakes and either wolves or dogs also are depicted. Hunting activity is represented by atlatls (slings to hurl spears), and two animals depicted in the panel are impaled by spears.

When I was at the Procession Panel, I looked around for other petroglyphs. Approximately 70 feet north of the panel I found two vertical grooves in the rock. They were about one foot long, about three-eights inch wide and one-half inch deep and in cross section were V-shaped. They did not look like art, but they appeared to be purposely formed. I looked up, then down, but they did not point to anything unusual. I did not know what these were.

It turns out that many Native American sites have grooves gouged into rock. The Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts has a display near Nauset Marsh of a 20-ton communal sharpening stone called Indian Rock. It commemorates thousands of years of activity of the Nauset people, who used the rock to sharpen spear points, harpoons and fishhooks.

Grooves in stone were formed by sharpening of weapons. Image by Jeff Mitton.

A similar display in Chatham, Massachusetts, recognizes the long history of the Monomoyick people with one of their sharpening stones. And for thousands of years, Native American people from at least 15 tribes in the northwest traveled to Kettle Falls on the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington to harvest salmon leaping up the falls.

All who came to catch fish were invited to sharpen their spear heads on the sharpening rock, a boulder weighing one ton that is now on display on the bank above the river, commemorating the times when the river ran free and Native American people lined its banks harvesting salmon. Here in Colorado, sharpening grooves are prominent at Balcony House in Mesa Verde National Park.

Archeologists have described and demonstrated the efficacy of abrasion for sharpening stone spear heads, bone awls or needles. By rubbing a spear head against stone to form or sharpen it, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel. Experiments with sharpening spear points produce grooves that are straight, V-shaped in cross section and shallower at the ends, like those at the Procession Panel.

However, Native American people used many implements, from large, heavy cutting tools wielded with two hands to butcher bison to axes for cutting trees to small knives for preparing food. For each of these, the shape of the groove differs because the shape and size of the tool differed. Sharpening grooves are seen at many Native American sites and on other continents.

Comb Ridge at sunset. Image by Jeff Mitton.

The Procession Panel shows atlatls, but not bows and arrows. The rock art panel was dated to 760 to 800 AD, about the time (800 AD) that bows and arrows replaced atlatls.

Once I began a literature search on grooves in stone at Native American sites, I was humbled by my realization that I had been ignorant of something that was common here in the West and known around the world.

But I got over that and remembered the exhilaration of visiting a place where the landscape so strikingly beautiful and imagining how life was for those who lived in Monarch Cave 800 years ago and fed themselves with what they could glean from their immediate surroundings. A visit to Comb Ridge is profoundly moving.

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By rubbing a spear head against stone to form or sharpen it, a groove is gouged very similar to the grooves beside the Procession Panel.

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Ancient/Classical History

Kylie Clarke — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:03:35 +0000

Ancient/Classical History Kylie Clarke Tue, 12/20/2022 - 09:03

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A Lesson from the Past?

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:03:35 +0000

A Lesson from the Past? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/20/2022 - 09:03

Robert L Hohlfelder

Marine concrete from the Roman empire has proven to stand the test of time—and offers insights into ways to combat rising sea levels now

Throughout the Mediterranean Sea, scores of ancient marine concrete monuments, once components of artificial harbors constructed by Roman builders as part of their vast imperial maritime infrastructure, have survived for two millennia and counting.

Modern marine concrete usually survives in the sea for little more than 50 years and sometimes even less. What did Roman builders know that modern harbor engineers did not? This was one of the questions that the Roman Maritime Concrete Study, an international, multidisciplinary project that I organized and co-directed in the first decade of this century, hoped to answer.

Field work was undertaken to collect and analyze concrete cores extracted from submerged structures at various ancient harbor sites in Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt. The results of this study were published in Building for Eternity: The History and Technology of Roman Concrete Engineering in the Sea in 2014 with a reprint in 2021.

At the top of the page: The last stages of the reproduction of a small marine concrete block using the same materials from the Bay of Naples in the harbor of Brindisi, Italy. Above: A massive concrete block, c. 15x11x4 m, discovered in the harbor of Caesarea Maritima, Israel.

The key ingredient responsible for the amazing durability of Roman marine concrete was volcanic ash or sand from the Bay of Naples, called pulvis puteolanus. It was the binding element in the mortar that, along with aggregate, comprised the concrete itself.

This Neapolitan volcanic ash has a unique chemical composition. When it was mixed with quick lime and seawater, to which rock aggregate was added, the resulting concrete could be placed while still in a liquid state into the sea within a variety of wooden formworks to set quickly and then cure over time. The internal chemical processes that occurred as the concrete cured underwater eventually reduced the porosity of the surface of the concrete block until it became like rock itself. Some scientists have claimed that Roman marine concrete is the most durable substance yet created by humankind.

Obviously, there is not enough volcanic ash in the Bay of Naples region to meet the demands of today’s world. However, material scientists throughout the world are using the data published in Building for Eternity as a starting point in efforts to recreate the chemical processes that occurred in Roman marine concrete that made it so durable—which could become even more important as sea levels rise in response to a warming climate.

NOAA scientists have predicted a sea level rise of at least 2 meters by the end of this century, and this might be a conservative estimate. If this prediction is close to being accurate, all of our coastal cities are at risk of flooding. There will be mass migration of our coastal populations to places like Colorado. But, if a new form of concrete could be used to build durable, long-lived seawalls at critical locations, say along the shores of Manhattan, perhaps our coastal cities might be able to survive.

Such seawalls, of course, would be only one part of future efforts to mitigate the sea level increase that threatens our future.

In addition, perhaps new marine concrete containers that, over time would become indistinguishable from rock itself, might provide one answer to how society safely stores nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel. On-site steel and concrete barrels, now used as storage containers in scores of locations scattered around our country, are not the answer, since they eventually will leak. New containers made of this impervious marine concrete might well prove to be better receptacles.

After hazardous nuclear material was emplaced, they could then be shipped safely to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository (YMNWR) to be stored in the caverns in this mountain. If so, we would have gone a long way to solving the issue of nuclear waste storage or disposal for perhaps the million years that was the hoped-for goal for the YMNWR. Moreover, there would be little possibility of leakage into nearby aquifers during these millennia.

As I often said to students in my classes, the ancients keep stealing our good ideas. When it comes to improving our marine concrete, we may learn a lesson from the distant past.

Marine concrete from the Roman empire has proven to stand the test of time—and offers insights into ways to combat rising sea levels now.

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