> Participants
Directors
Jean-Louis Ferrary (EPHE IVe section)
Philippe Moreau (Université de Paris Est Créteil, émérite)
Yann Rivière (EHESS)
ANHIMA members
Clara Berrendonner, Julien Dubouloz, Jean-Louis Ferrary, Philippe Moreau, Sylvie Pittia, Yann Rivière, John Scheid
External participants
Tim Cornell (Manchester), Michael Crawford (University College London), Marianne Coudry (Mulhouse), Michel Humbert (Paris Panthéon Assas), Michel Humm (Strasbourg), Dario Mantovani (Pavie), Luigi Pellecchi (Pavie)
> About
The LEPOR (LEges POpuli Romani) program is an international project to create and maintain a database of entries for every comitial law of the Roman people (lex rogata, plebis scitum, or rogatio when at least a bill or plebiscite was posted) accessible online and available to the scholarly world at large free of charge.
Each entry will contain several fields:
・ “Name of the law”;
・ “Date”;
・ “Rogator” (giving the name or names of the rogator or rogatores);
・ “Subject” (indicating the legislative area or areas the law concerns: grants of citizenship, agrarian laws, etc.);
・ “Sources” (giving a complete list of references in the ancient sources that explicitly mention the law or refer to it in an indirect but certain manner);
・ “Bibliography” (selective, going back to the works of the humanists and not systematically privileging the most recent publications);
・ “Commentary” (setting out the normative content of the law, the significance of its adoption in its political context, and its afterlife – complementary measures, total or partial abrogation);
・ The names of the author or authors of the entry, the collaborator(s) who entered it, the date of its initial posting and that of revisions, and the standard way to cite the entry in a publication.
Preliminary outlines and numbered paragraphs will make it easier to consult long entries. Most entries will be composed in French, but some will be in English or Italian.
The ancient Latin and Greek sources for each law, whether literary, legal, papyrological, epigraphic, or numismatic, and whether they are mentioned in the “Sources” or “Commentary” field, will be integrated and accessible to readers by means of hyperlinks, allowing readers to load them with a simple click.
Users of the database will have several search options to access information: by character strings in every field, by the date of the law (precise date, chronological range, before or after a given date), by the name of the rogator, by the theme of the law, and by reference in an ancient source.
Use of the database will be facilitated by a “Search help” page and other pages with helpful lists (“Subjects of laws”; “Abbreviations” of editions of ancient sources, conventional abbreviations for authors’ names and ancient works, of corpora, of the names and works of the most frequently cited modern authors, and of select journal titles).
Besides consultation on a computer screen, it will be possible to print each entry with or without the text of the ancient sources.
The database will be hosted and maintained by the Digital Resources Center TELMA (technical maintenance, under the direction of Cyril Masset) and the TGE Adonis (hosting the server).
> Publications
The LEPOR project has led to the publication of a significant number of volumes and articles by each of the collaborators. We will cite only the most recent one: J. L. Ferrary (ed.), Leges publicae: La legge nell’esperienza giuridica romana (Pavia: IUSS Press, 2012), 805 pages.
> Ongoing and future projects
The next meetings will address:
・ launching the online database (already underway); for entry in the database, the entries composed by Yan Thomas (†): lex Aebutia, Furia de testamentis, Iulia de iudiciis priuatis, [P]Laetoria, Voconia;
・ scholarly confirmation of new entries to be included in the database by collective scrutiny.
> Prospects
Finalization of the database structure, especially its search capabilities, and progress on entering and correcting the entries (ca. 180 entries have been reviewed and corrected over the summer of 2014), thanks to the collaboration of Jeremy Bernardi, doctoral student in the UMR, let us anticipate the official public launch of the database by the end of the calendar year.
