Sharing Water in the Roman Countryside: Environmental Issues, Economic Interests, and Legal Solutions

Abstract

This paper seeks to provide lines of approach and hypotheses for a historical and geographic contextualisation of the jurisprudential texts of the Digest. It focuses upon the matter of water sharing in rural landscapes. After examining different landscapes, it argues that legal solutions proposed by Roman jurists originally applied to the situation of competition for natural resources observed in the periphery of Rome and were linked with the development of the city between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.