Lex Petronia
Lex Petronia forbade masters to make their slaves fight with wild beasts, unless they had committed some serious offence, and the magistrate had assented to their being so treated (Dig. 48, 8, 11, 2; Gel. 5.14); it was followed by a number of senatusconsulta to the same purpose. Puchta (Institutionen, § 107) is of opinion that it provided for the appointment of special magistrates in the towns to deal with the matter; but the inscriptions on which he relies (cited in Marquardt, Röm. Staatsverwaltung, i. p. 494) seem to relate to a different Lex Petronia (de praefectis). Whether there were two leges or one, the first mention of legislation by this name occurs in the fasti of Venusia, B.C. 32.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.