There were two legal professions in Ancient Rome: the law was created by the jurists and their work that has been received into the modern systems

but the daily practice of the courts, socially of equal importance, was the terrain of the advocates. This book investigates the role of advocacy throughout the Roman world from the second century BC to the fifth century AD, with attention to the Greek-speaking part of the world, and so to the papyri.

The law is here concieved broadly, to include its administrative branches, concerned with taxation and with relations between government and the municipalities, for there too, advocacy was wanted and used. In the final chapter Professor Crook seeks to set the record straight by arguing that advocacy did not, in consequence of the onset of increasingly bureaucratic government, atrophy or wither away, but flourished unabated.