Legal Standardization and Localism in Roman Africa: The Sufetes Africae and the Romanization Process

This chapter proposes an alternative perspective on the idea of Romanization from a legal standpoint. It aims to challenge the narrative of state-centered legal pluralism, rather than with a deep legal pluralism model, with a narrative that can be called ‘of standardization’. This means to identify those minimum standards—guidelines, general principles to be imitated—that were established to allow for intelligibility and comparability between Roman and local legal traditions or practices. This reading will consider how the Romans were able to create a system of administration composed of both Roman and local elements that could, nonetheless, run smoothly. The chapter argues that the Romans were able to govern provincial territories without the imposition of a standard model or a formula, leaving room for diversity and directing the focus toward processes of differentiation between various practices by setting the minimum level of functionality that political institutions must have in order to work in the Roman(ized) system. In the end, this reading will allow us to change the meaning traditionally attributed to the term Romanization without having to replace it with something else in order to strip it of its imperialistic connotation.To do so, the chapter will present an example from Roman Africa, that is the magistracy of the sufetes, which was an indigenous magistracy of Carthaginian origin that coexisted with the Roman provincial ones until the second century CE as the head of the administration of most of the local civitates peregrinae. The existing assessments of this magistracy will be discussed, suggesting a reading that considers the sufetes in continuity with the Roman duumvirate not as a mere expression of legal pluralism but rather as an example of application of a standard in allowing a local institution.