EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 167remained valid throughout the millennium up to Justinian.^11 Cicero says
schoolboys had it by heart. Interpretation of the law (lex) and its expansion
to meet new needs was the task of the jurists, whose discipline (ius) emerged
from roughly the beginning of the third century BCE, and acquired known
(to us) representatives from the mid-second century, along with more than a
dash of dialectical method derived from the latest Greek philosophy.^12 This
imbued Roman law with a logical and theoretical dimension that enabled
systematic analysis, and brought out the unity, of a tradition whose ad hoc,
case-by-case procedures were strained by the rapid expansion of empire. Still,
Roman law remained at heart pragmatic, loath to argue from general prin-
ciples. In that lay its clarity and strength.
Roman law entered its classical phase approximately in the reign of Augus-
tus. Especially through the writing of commentaries on earlier works, jurists
sought to establish continuity with the past, thicken the web of legal prece-
dent, and embed it in a rational framework indebted to Stoicism and Aristo-
tle. About the year 150 one Gaius produced a beginners’ textbook, the Insti-
tutes, later hugely influential, not least on Justinian’s Digest (despite which, it
is the only specimen of classical Roman legal writing to have been preserved
almost intact, its material intensely subdivided following philosophical mod-
els). The classical period culminated with the jurists who served the Severan
dynasty (193–235), gathering imperial rescripts (responses to individual pe-
titions) and fashioning them into an impressive body of private law. Notable
among these Severan jurists were that “man of superior genius”^13 but no great
expository talent Papinian (d. 212), along with the more lucid, systematic,
and incipiently encyclopedic Ulpian (d. 223), and Paul (fl. c. 210). These lat-
ter two, in their huge commentaries, saved most of what has survived from
the wreck of republican and imperial law via the Digest, about half of whose
contents they supplied. “The sharpness of focus is unmistakeable, the short-
ness of the period in which practically all of the surviving major legal writing
of the Roman world was produced little short of astonishing.”^14
Ulpian defined jurisprudence as “knowledge of things divine and human,
the science of what is just and unjust.” It is the “true philosophy”; the jurists
are her priests.^15 “The house of a great lawyer is assuredly the oracular seat of
11 M. Humbert (ed.), Le Dodici Tavole (Pavia 2005). For a skeptical view of their historicity, see
M. T. Fögen, Römische Rechtsgeschichten (Göttingen 2002) 63–69 (reference courtesy of Luca Giuliani).
12 O. Behrends, “Die geistige Mitte des römischen Rechts,” ZRG 125 (2008) 25–107.
13 Theodosian code [4:73] 1.4.3.2.
14 D. Ibbetson, “High classical law,” CAH 12.186. On the importance of commentary see Schia-
vone, Invention of law [1:37] 356–57 and n. 64.
15 Digest [ed. T. Mommsen, revised P. Krueger, Corpus iuris civilis 1 (Berlin 1928^15 ); tr. ed. A.
Watson (Philadelphia 1998, revised ed.)] 1.1.1.1, 1.1.10.2; Ibbetson [6:14], CAH 12.192; Schiavone,
Invention of law [1:37] 424–28.