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The End of Roman Juristic Writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Alan Watson
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Extract

I first met Reuven Yaron in 1958, and we immediately became fast friends. The friendship with him and Shoshana has deepened over the years, and will continue. He and I have frequently read one another's draft papers. I thank him for many years of intellectual and emotional support, and hope he will take pleasure in this offering that he has had no possibility of criticising in advance.

The traditional date for the end of classical Roman law is 235 when the emperor Alexander Severus was murdered, or slightly later with the death of Modestinus, the last of the great known jurists. Thereafter, few original juristic books were written, and it is widely but not universally believed that a decline in legal standards began almost at once.

For many scholars there seems to exist a connection, sometimes simply implicit, between the failure of jurists to write new books, and a decline in legal standards. I should like to suggest there was a different reason for jurists ceasing to write new law books. They had already written them all! The claim that for the period, say fifty years, after around 235, all the law books had already been written seems extreme, but is easy to substantiate.

Type
Roman Law
Information
Israel Law Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1-2 , Winter-Spring 1995 , pp. 228 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1995

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References

1 The main exception is Hermogenianus, Iuris epitomae.

2 On the subject see, e.g., Honoré, T., “Conveyances of Land and Professional Standards in the Later Empire”, in New Perspectives in the Roman Law of Property, Birka, P., ed. (Oxford, 1989) 137ff.Google Scholar

3 See Kunkel, W., Herkunft und soziale Stellung der römischen Juristen, (Graz., 2nd ed., 1967) 244.Google Scholar

4 See Kunkel, , Herkunft, at 245ff.Google Scholar; for the date of his murder see P. Oxy. 2565; Modrzejewski, J. and Zawadzki, T., “La date de la mort d'Ulpien et la Préfecture du Prétoire au début du règne d'Alexandre Sévère” (1967) 45 Revue Historique de Droit Français et Étranger 565ff.Google Scholar; Bauman, Richard, “The Death of Ulpian, the Irresistible Force and the Unmovable Object” (1995) 112 Zeitschrift der Savigny Stiftung 385ff.Google Scholar

5 Furius Anthianus had 5 books on the Edict; only 10 books of Gaius on the Edict were found by Justinian's Digest compilers, but he had also written 37 books on the provincial Edict.

6 D. 1.2.1.41.

7 This appears very clearly from Rotondi, G., Leges publicae populi romani (Milan, 1922) 468ff.Google Scholar

8 See, e.g., Schulz, F., History of Roman Legal Science (Oxford, 1946) 229f.Google Scholar

9 Witness his role in the Valentinian Law of Citations: C. Th. 1.4.3.

10 See, e.g., Brandsma, F., “Publiciana Rescissoria, or is Papinian ‘zu spitz’”, (1992) 5 Subseciva Groningana 41ff.Google Scholar

11 The texts in the Digest are conveniently collected in Gualandi, G., Legislazione imperiale e giurisprudenza (Milan, 1963).Google Scholar

12 On the rescripts of these emperors see Watson, A., Legal Origins and Legal Change (London, 1991) 45ff, 61ff.Google Scholar