Beacon Lights of History, Volume 03: Ancient Achievements. John Lord
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These eminent lawyers shed great glory on the Roman civilization. In the earliest times men sought distinction on the fields of battle, but in the latter days of the republic honor was conferred for forensic ability. The first pleaders of Rome were not jurisconsults, but aristocratic "patrons," who looked after their "clients,"–men of lower social grade, who in return for protection and assistance rendered service, sometimes political by voting, sometimes pecuniary, sometimes military. But when law became complicated, a class of men arose to interpret it. These men were held in great honor, and reached by their services the highest offices,–like Cicero and Hortensius. No remuneration was given originally for forensic pleading beyond the services which the client gave to a patron, but gradually the practice of the law became lucrative. Hortensius, as well as Cicero, gained an immense fortune; he had several villas, a gallery of paintings, a large stock of wines, parks, fish-ponds, and aviaries. Cicero had villas in all parts of Italy, a house on the Palatine with columns of Numidian marble, and a fortune of twenty millions of sesterces, equal to eight hundred thousand dollars. Most of the great statesmen of Rome in the time of Cicero were either lawyers or generals. Crassus, Pompey, P. Sextus, M. Marcellus, P. Clodius, Asinius Pollio, C. Cicero, M. Antonius, Julius Caesar, Caelius, Brutus, Catullus, were all celebrated for their forensic efforts. Candidates for the bar studied four years under a distinguished jurist, and were required to pass a rigorous examination. The judges were chosen from members of the bar, as well as in later times the senators. The great lawyers were not only learned in the law, but possessed great accomplishments. Varro was a lawyer, and was the most learned man that Rome ever produced. But under the emperors the lawyers were chiefly distinguished for their legal attainments, like Paulus and Ulpian.
During this golden age of Roman jurisprudence many commentaries were written on the Twelve Tables, the Perpetual Edict, the Laws of the People, and the Decrees of the senate, as well as a vast mass of treatises on every department of the law, most of which have perished. The Institutes of Gaius, already mentioned, are the most valuable that remain, and have thrown great light on some important branches previously involved in obscurity. Their use in explaining the Institutes of Justinian is spoken of very highly by Mackenzie, since the latter are mainly founded on the long-lost work of Gaius. The great lawyers who flourished from Trajan to Alexander Severus, like Gaius, Ulpian, Paulus, Papinian, and Modestinus, had no successors who can be compared with them, and their works became standard authorities in the courts of law.
After the death of Alexander Severus, 235 A.D., no great accession was made to Roman law until Theodosius II., 438 A.D., caused the constitutions, from Constantine to his own time, to be collected and arranged in sixteen books. This was called the Theodosian Code, which in the West was held in high esteem. It was very influential among the Germanic nations, serving as the chief basis of their early legislation; it also paved the way for the more complete codification that followed in the Justinian Code, which superseded it.
To Justinian belongs the immortal glory of reforming the jurisprudence of the Romans. "In the space of ten centuries," says Gibbon, "the infinite variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand volumes, which no fortune could purchase, and no capacity could digest. Books could not easily be found, and the judges, poor in the midst of riches, were reduced to the exercise of their illiterate discretion." The emperors had very early begun to issue ordinances, under the authority of the various offices gathered into their hands; and these, together with the answers to appeals from the lower courts made to the emperors directly, or to the sort of supreme court which they established, were called imperial constitutions and rescripts. Justinian determined to unite in one body all the rules of law, whatever may have been their origin; and in the year 528 appointed ten jurisconsults, among whom was the celebrated Tribonian, to select and arrange the imperial constitutions and rescripts, leaving out what was obsolete or useless or contradictory, and to make such alterations as the circumstances required. This was called the Code, divided into twelve books, and comprising the constitutions from Hadrian to Justinian. It was published in fourteen months after it was undertaken.
Justinian thereupon authorized Tribonian, then quaestor, vir magnificus magisteria dignitate inter agentes decoratus,--"for great titles were now given to the officers of the crown,"–to prepare, with the assistance of sixteen associates, a collection of extracts from the writings of the most eminent jurists, so as to form a body of law for the government of the empire, with power to select and omit and alter; and this immense work was done in three years, and published under the title of Digest, or Pandects. Says Lord Mackenzie:
"All the judicial learning of former times was laid under contribution by Tribonian and his colleagues. Selections from the works of thirty-nine of the ablest lawyers, scattered over two thousand separate treatises, were collected in one volume; and care was taken to inform posterity that three millions of lines were abridged and reduced in these extracts to the modest number of one hundred and fifty thousand. Among the selected jurists only three names belonged to the age of the republic,–the civilians who flourished under the first emperors are seldom appealed to; so that most of the writers whose works have contributed to the Pandects lived within a period of one hundred years. More than a third of the whole Pandects is from Ulpian, and next to him the principal writers are Paulus, Papinian, Salvius Julianus, Pomponius, Q. Cervidius Scaevola, and Gaius. Though the variety of subjects is immense, the Digest has no claims to scientific arrangement. It is a vast cyclopedia of heterogeneous law badly arranged; everything is there, but everything is not in its proper