Witness vs Lawyer in the Roman courts. Linguistic strategies of evasiveness and turns, intimidation in Roman trial debates.

A great deal is known, in some ways, about Roman criminal and civil procedure, and about the doings of a Roman court, both from the perspectives of Roman law and legal history and from the perspective of Roman oratory. Here I will try to use the evidence of Roman court proceedings, as available from oratory, rhetorical treatises, and extant legal documents, to build up a small dossier of ‘dialogic exchange in Latin’ tying in with what I have attempted to do on Roman politeness, linguistic turns, conversational registers, and ultimately, the pragmatics of Latin.