Roman Jurisprudence and Its Transmission

The emergence of a jurisprudence with these characteristics would hardly have been possible without the reception of Greek philosophy in repub­lican Rome.⁹⁶ Of decisive importance, however, was the role of the legal expert in the application and development of law.

Decisive for the European significance of Roman law, moreover, was something that had been completely alien to classical Roman law: a comprehensive act of legislation by the Emperor Justinian. He ordered an enormous compilation of excerpts from the writings of the classical period to be produced (the Digest) which he then promulgated as law, together with a collection of previous imperial legislation and an introductory textbook. As is apparent from its Greek name (pandectae; hence pandectist legal science), the Digest was supposed to be comprehensive, which was also a rather un-Roman idea. ‘May no lawyer dare to add commentaries to our work and spoil its brevity through his verbosity’, Justinian decreed.⁹⁸ But that remained a naive and pious hope. Justinian could not prevent scholars from making a work of scholarship itself the object of scholarship. That was necessary, inter alia, because he had introduced an additional level of complexity into the body oflegal sources: the texts to be compiled in the Digest were more than 300 years old, and Justinian had therefore ordered their revision and adaptation to contemporary conditions (this was the origin of the so-called interpolations); he had placed next to one another and invested with equal validity texts from completely different periods of

Roman legal development, and he had adopted into his compilation a variety of texts that reflected controversies among the Roman lawyers and that therefore hardly constituted the kind of material suitable for an act of legislation.

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