Labeo’s iniuria

violence and politics in the age of Augustus

Abstract

The transition from Republic to Principate has often been characterized as a process of quashing political violence by centralizing political power in the person of the emperor. This paper argues instead
that the transition is marked by a new understanding of the relationship between violence and politics, a transition that might be characterized as a move from concern with vis to a new understanding of political violence based on the concept of iniuria. This new set of metaphors posed problems in particular for the jurist M. Antistius Labeo, whose writings reflect a concern with how to delimit the concept of iniuria, an old concept with newly politicized significance.