Beneficium in iniuriam vertitur? The Impact of New Citizens on Roman Family Law in the Second Half of the First Century AD: A Case-Study of the Spanish Municipal Statutes

The Roman Empire has been celebrated for its integration policies, e.g. through granting citizenship to retired soldiers of the auxilia or to honoratiores of municipia. So far, however, it has been rarely looked at the effects these integration-policies had on Roman law. In this paper, the extent of the flexibility of Roman law dealing with incoming “foreign” elements (persons, legal traditions, etc.) is analyzed, with focus on elite integration. Particularly, some effects and necessities of regulating those issues can be observed in the Spanish municipal statutes. While on the one hand, legislators and jurisprudents tried everything to integrate such cases into the existing framework, at certain points minor issues became major problems and forced to modify or even change long-lived legal frames, especially with regard to family law and law of succession. Imperial taxation of inheritances, the so-called vicesimal hereditatium, can be regarded as a specific promoter of such change. Thus, the contact zones of municipia with regular “production” of new citizens had a great impact on the whole system of Roman law and society, and substantially tested Roman “integrativeness”.