The Rise of the Centumviral Court in the Augustan Age

Scholars rightly hold that the restoration of social and political order under Augustus involved restricting certain long-standing arenas of aristocratic competition. Less well known is that aristocrats generated new arenas of competition to fill the lacuna. This chapter examines the centumviral court, a civil court with jurisdiction over wills and succession matters. Virtually invisible in Cicero’s day, when the criminal courts reigned supreme, it emerged in the Augustan age as an important venue for aristocratic competition. This rise in status can be attributed to its continuing to offer large juries and large crowds (assisted by its installation in the refurbished Basilica Julia) even as the criminal courts lost prominence. Other new arenas for competitive eloquence (declamation, recitation, forensic oratory before the Senate or emperor) involved smaller, select audiences. The centumviral court therefore became ever more attractive to aristocratic orators aspiring to public visibility in the early principate.