Roman Law Group: Lampreys and the Birth of Imperial Jurisdiction

At the beginning of the Roman Principate, the emperor Augustus stopped a depraved courtier from feeding his slave to specially trained lampreys. Around the same time, Romans started to see emperors as judges—as officials with broad power to correct antisocial behavior and to uphold public order, who might exercise that power in legal forms. This talk argues that the two events are intimately related, and that the story of Vedius Pollio and his man-eating fish worked to justify imperial intrusions into spaces that had previously been understood as outside of state control. In doing so, it also lays out a model of how law and culture might reinforce each other in a space as legally unbounded as Augustan Rome; at a time when no one was entirely sure what having an emperor meant, urban legends like the Pollio story gave subjects a conceptual framework within which they could fit imperial jurisdiction.

The talk consists of a historical and a methodological argument. First, I discuss the sources for this nasty little folktale; Pollio recurs frequently in imperial literature, in genres where we might expect this kind of thing (historiography, ethics) and where we might not (epic poetry, Pliny’s Natural History). This recurrent quality reflects broader instabilities brought on by Augustus and the Principate, as subjects became unsure of what kind of conversation could best encapsulate their new realities, and was critical to Pollio’s role in legal history. It is not at all obvious, to us or to Romans themselves, whether the story of Pollio is a legal story. Pollio’s polyvalence let audiences see him first as a tacky sadist, and only later as a defendant; that made him useful to an imperial state that was slowly acculturating itself to imperial judgment.

It also makes him useful to us, as a tool for understanding how law and culture intersect. The disciplinary structure of modern scholarship makes us think about legal production as ontologically distinct from other kinds of discourse—it is studied by different people who teach different students in different faculties. But in moments of true legal uncertainty like the one in which Pollio lived, people’s attitudes towards law are shaped by broader, thicker questions that cannot be sealed away within legal corpora. I close the talk by considering this imbrication and how it might inform different approaches to Roman legal history.

Speaker: Professor Zachary Herz

Zach Herz is a trained attorney and classicist studying Imperial legal culture. He is particularly interested in how Romans used law to make sense of autocracy—how the structures and expectations of ‘law talk’ helped people living in the Roman world imagine that world as something orderly, structured, and fair.

Zach is the author of The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories (Cambridge 2025), which argues that our major archives of Roman legal writing should be understood less as a collection of binding, impersonal rules than as a complex form of ideal theory—Roman jurists described a hypothetical world governed by positive law, which later generations took as a straightforward historical archive.

Zach also writes regularly on queer theory and queer history, especially on how gender informs the Principate; he has published on cinaedi in Juvenal and in biographies of the emperor Elagabalus. He is currently writing Roman Law for Historians, a guide for scholars using legal sources for historical research, and editing the proceedings of a conference on imperial correspondence together with Serena Connolly, Elsemieke Daalder, and Matthijs Wibier. Zach’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and Boulder’s Center for the Humanities and Arts among others.