ABSTRACT
The administration and enforcement of law by judges, iudices, was a high-profile activity in late antiquity. Governors of provinces, whose main function was to act as judges of first resort, held their hearings in public, in front of crowds. Private rooms, to which access could be gained not by fair means but by bribery, were forbidden and judges were obliged to stay on their tribunals until all cases pending had been heard (Codex Theodosianus 1.16.6, of AD 331). As was traditional, they were supported by a council of their legal advisers, or assessors. Christian bishops, too, administered their own form of justice, with their own consilium of priests and other advisers. Much is said about iudices in the sources and we might reasonably expect from an examination of representations of judges by their contemporaries, by legal sources, or by historians, to gain some idea of the nature of late Roman justice and the legal culture within which it functioned.
