Petitions and the Fight for Legal Rights in the Later Roman Empire, 200-450 CE

This dissertation explores why individuals across the Roman Empire petitioned emperors between 200 and 450 CE, focusing on petitioners’ everyday concerns and motivations for seeking imperial intervention. Drawing on surviving petitions and imperial responses, this project examines how Roman subjects turned to emperors and imperial officials to resolve disputes, address injustices, and protect personal interests. Petitioning emerges as a practical response to specific local problems, such as property disputes or divorce, but also as a political act with broader implications. By appealing to the emperor, petitioners actively tested the accessibility and responsiveness of imperial authority, while simultaneously reinforcing its legitimacy through their participation in imperial legal and administrative structures. The act of petitioning is thus part of a larger discourse on imperial authority, where everyday grievances intersected with broader questions of justice, obligation, and power. Through this lens, the dissertation reveals how imperial authority was not simply imposed from above but was continually shaped through the interactions between emperors and their officials with subjects who sought no just relief, but recognition and redress within the imperial framework.