Lampreys and the Birth of Imperial Jurisdiction

Imperial authors frequently discuss an equestrian courtier of Augustus named Vedius Pollio, who enjoyed feeding his slaves to specially trained lampreys. This story persists over two centuries of Latin literature and often centers around Pollio’s interactions with Augustus, who prevented him from executing an enslaved child in this way and then razed Pollio’s house after his death. I argue that the Pollio story worked to explain or justify increasing supervision of elite households in the Augustan period, and in particular a swath of new legislation restricting enslavers’ autonomy. I compare this legislation to Augustus’ marriage laws, in order to demonstrate how Pollio might render an innovative jurisdictional scheme into something both morally correct and ambiguously traditional. At the same time, I engage with a more theoretical literature on legal pluralism to show how “nonlegal” institutions contributed to the shared understanding of imperial power that would later underlie the emperor’s adjudicative jurisdiction.