Law of Caesar on Municipalities (44 BCE) Commentary by M. Callahan, Independent Scholar, London, England

The text of the Law of Caesar on Municipalities comes from bronze panels known as the Tablets of Heraclea, which were discovered in two parts in 1732 and 1735, respectively, near the town of Heraclea, a former Greek city in southern Italy near Naples on the Gulf of Tarentum. (Southern Italy was once in the possession of the Greeks and was known as Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece.) On one side are inscriptions in Greek, dating to the third or fourth century bce and relating to land rights and rules of use of the areas around two temples. On the other side, Latin inscriptions record the Law of Caesar on Municipalities. It is unknown whether the Latin inscriptions refer to all municipalities gained under the Roman program of territorial expansion or only to municipalities in the Italian peninsula or just to the town of Heraclea itself. While the laws are representative of the new type of legislative, political, and fiscal changes enacted by Caesar, it is not clear where these...