Edict, magistrate's
During the Roman Republican period, the edictum perpetuum of the urban praetor was crucial to the development of civil law (see edict, praetor's). Though the praetor's edict was by far and away the most influential in this respect, several other officers of state, who functioned in the capital, also possessed the ius edicendi: dictators, censors, consuls, aediles, quaestors, tribunes of the plebs, and the pontifex maximus. The edicts of these magistrates (and the pontifex) were issued annually, at the moment when the newly elected officers began their terms, as was the case with the praetors. The intent of these other annual edicta seems to have been to communicate publicly, and in broad terms, the manner in which these individuals would function while in office (cf. Wieacker 1988: 407). 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
government, politics, and law; 
justice; 
legal history
The Lex Irnitana: a New Copy of the Flavian Municipal Law
In the spring of 1981, on a hill called Molino del Postero, in undulating territory 5 km south-west of El Saucejo and 3 km north-east of Algámitas, in the province of Seville, a group of men looking for ancient coins and armed with metal-detectors discovered six bronze tablets and some small fragments of other tablets, containing part of the municipal law of a hitherto unknown town, the Municipium Flavium Irnitanum. Although the name of the town was probably Irni, since ancient place-names in Spain ending with -i are very common, such as Astigi, Ucubi, Tucci, Iptuci etc, a name such as Irnium remains possible.
The World of the Golden Ass
Those who study and teach the history of the Ancient World suffer from a great disadvantage, which we find difficult to admit even to ourselves: in a perfectly literal sense we do not know what we are talking about. Of course we can dispose of a vast range of accumulated knowledge about what we are talking about. We can compile lists of officeholders in the Roman Empire, without our evidence revealing how government worked or even whether it made any impact at all on the ordinary person; we can discuss the statuses of cities and look at the archaeological remains of some of them (or rather some parts of some of them) without having any notion of their social and economic functions, or of whether it made any real difference whether an inhabitant of the Roman provinces lived in a small city or a large village.