AUDITO´RIUM
AUDITO´RIUM as the name implies, is any place for
hearing. It was the practice among the Romans for poets and orators to read
their compositions to their friends, who were sometimes called the
auditorium (
Plin. Ep.
4.7); but under the empire the word was applied to a court of
justice. Under the republic the place for all judicial proceedings was the
Comitium and the Forum ( “ni pagunt in comitio aut in foro ante
meridiem causam conjicito quum perorant ambo praesentes,”
Dirksen,
Uebersicht, &c., p. 725). Under the empire,
the Forum continued to be the place where magistrates and judices heard
civil causes. But for the sake of shelter and convenience, it became
[p. 1.248]a practice to hold courts in the Basilicae, halls
of temples, and other suitable places about the Forum. Such enclosed courts
were called
auditoria, or places in which the
plaints of litigants were heard. The effect of this change was that courts
of justice were less frequented by the public than when they were held in an
open space. So in the dialogue
de Oratoribus
(100.39) the writer observes that oratory had lost much by cases being
generally heard in
auditoria and
tabularia. The courts of the provincial governors
were not always open to the public in the time of Cicero (
Cic. Ver. 5.11, 27). Their courts appear to have been held at a later period, either
in the hall of their Praetorium or in the open Forum (St. John 18.33,
19.9-13; Acts of the Apost. 15.23,
ἀκροατήριον).
The emperors at first sometimes sat in the Forum, but they soon gave up the
practice, and only exercised justice within their own palace. The place
where the court sat was called the
auditorium
principis or
sacrum auditorium. The
auditorium principis is first mentioned in
reference to M. Aurelius, and afterwards becomes a common term (
Dig. 36, tit. 1, s. 22; 49, tit. 9, s. 1 ;
D. C. 76.11;
Dig. 4, tit.
4, s. 18). The
praefectus praetorio and
praefectus urbi, who exercised the imperial
jurisdiction, also sat in
auditoria (
Dig. 12, tit. 1, s. 40 ; 23, tit. 3, s. 78.4). The
imperial court of justice (
auditorium
principis) is sometimes distinguished from the imperial
administrative council (
consistorium
principis), but in later Roman law the distinction is not always
maintained.
Under the later empire, judicial proceedings were carried on with less
publicity.
In the time of Diocletian, the auditorium was also called
secretarium. In a constitution of Constantine the two words
were used as equivalent (Cod. Th. i. tit. 16, s. 6), when he enacts that
both criminal and civil cases should be heard openly from the tribunal, and
not in
auditoria or
secretaria.
Valentinianus and Valens allowed causes to be heard either before the
tribunal or in the
secretarium; but in the
latter the doors were to be left open.
From the 5th cent. causes were exclusively heard in the
secretarium or
secretum. The
public was shut off by
cancelli and curtains
(
vela), which in exceptional cases were
drawn aside (
levato velo cognoscere, Cod.
Theod. vi. tit. 13, s. 9). Under the despotic system of the late empire the
public was excluded from the inner
secretarium,
but persons of a certain rank (
honorati) and
those invited by the magistrate were admitted to it. (Bethmann-Hollweg,
Civil-Process, § 147.)
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