Latin
Ancient Law
Roman Law and Society, Useful Links to Roman Law Materials. 2.1.405
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I know nothing more wonderful than the variety of sciences to which Roman law, Roman Contract-law more particularly, has contributed modes of thought, courses of reasoning, and a technical language. Of the subjects which have whetted the intellectual appetite of the moderns, there is scarcely one, except Physic, which has not been Altered through Roman jurisprudence. The science of pure Metaphysics had, indeed, rather a Greek than a Roman parentage, but Politics, Moral Philosophy, and even Theology found in Roman law not only a vehicle of expression, but a nidus in which some of their profoundest inquiries were nourished into maturity. For the purpose of accounting for this phenomenon, it is not absolutely necessary to discuss the mysterious relation between words and ideas, or to explain how it is that the human mind has never grappled with any subject of thought, unless it has been provided beforehand with a proper store of language and with an apparatus of appropriate logical methods. It is enough to remark, that, when the philosophical interests of the Eastern and Western worlds were separated, the founders of Western thought belonged to a society which spoke Latin and reflected in Latin. But in the Western provinces the only language which retained sufficient precision for philosophical purposes was the language of Roman law, which by a singular fortune had preserved nearly all the purity of the Augustan age, while vernacular Latin was degenerating into a dialect of portentous barbarism. And if Roman jurisprudence supplied the only means of exactness in speech, still more emphatically did it furnish the only means of exactness, subtlety, or depth in thought. For at least three centuries, philosophy and science were without a home in the West; and though metaphysic and metaphysical theology were engrossing the mental energies of multitudes of Roman subjects, the phraseology employed in these ardent inquiries was exclusively Greek, and their theater was te Eastern half of the Empire. Sometimes, indeed, the conclusions of the Eastern disputants became so important that every man's assent to them, or dissent from them, had to be recorded, and then the West was introduced to the results of Eastern controversy, which it generally acquiesced in without interest and without resistance. Meanwhile, one department of inquiry, difficult enough for the most laborious, deep enough for the most subtle, delicate enough for the most refined, had never lost its attractions for the educated classes of the Western provinces. To the cultivated citizen of Africa, of Spain, of Gaul and of Northern Italy it was jurisprudence, and jurisprudence only, which stood in the place of poetry and history, of philosophy and science. So far then from there being anything mysterious in the palpably legal complexion of the earliest efforts of Western thought it would rather be astonishing if it had assumed any other hue. I can only express my surprise at the scantiness of the attention which has been given to the difference between Western ideas and Eastern, between Western theology and Eastern, caused by the presence of a new ingredient. It is precisely because the influence of jurisprudence begins to be powerful that the foundation of Constantinople and the subsequent separation of the Western Empire from the Eastern, are epochs in philosophical history. But continental thinkers are doubtless less capable of appreciating the importance of this crisis by the very intimacy with which notions derived from Roman Law are mingled up with every day ideas. Englishmen, on the other hand, are blind to it through the monstrous ignorance to which they condemn themselves of the most plentiful source of the stream of modern knowledge, of the one intellectual result of the Roman civilization. At the same time, an Englishman, who will be at the pains to familiarize himself with the classical Roman law is perhaps, from the very slightness of the interest which his countrymen have hitherto taken in the subject, better judge than a Frenchman or a German of the value of the assertions I have ventured to make. Anybody who knows what Roman jurisprudence is, as actually practiced by the Romans, and who will observe in what characteristic the earliest Western theology and philosophy differ from the phases of thought which preceded them, may be safely left to pronounce what was the new element which had begun to pervade and govern speculation.