The article aims to understand why some Roman jurists sometimes needed to support their legal arguments with verses taken from the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. As the first step, this study focused on the famous dispute between Sabinians and Proculians about the relationship between sale and barter, attested in two basic sources, Gaius, 3, 141, and Paul, 33 to edictum, D. 18, 1, 1, which contain four quotes from Homer; subsequently it has been extended to the entire repertory of quotations from Homer present in Roman legal texts surviving in the Corpus Juris Civilis. The general purpose of the research has been to explore the theory according to such quotes would have had merely rhetorical or decorative intents, lacking whatever purpose of hermeneutical clarification. The end of the research supports the hypothesis that, on the contrary, these poetical sources would serve not only and not so much to prove the Greek origin of the Roman disciplines, but to define or clarify the contours of technical expressions (as venenum in the lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis, as analyzed in Gaius, 4 to legem XII tabularum, D. 50, 16, 236 pr., with respect to Od., 4, 230) or to illustrate special disciplines of Roman institutions with the support of the Greek quotations. This would be, therefore, a clear strategy of argumentation, introduced by Masurius Sabinus and improved by jurists of the second century b. Ch.
I GIURISTI ROMANI LEGGONO OMERO. SULL’USO DELLA LETTERATURA COLTA NELLA GIURISPRUDENZA CLASSICA
FIORENTINI, Mario
2013-01-01
Abstract
The article aims to understand why some Roman jurists sometimes needed to support their legal arguments with verses taken from the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. As the first step, this study focused on the famous dispute between Sabinians and Proculians about the relationship between sale and barter, attested in two basic sources, Gaius, 3, 141, and Paul, 33 to edictum, D. 18, 1, 1, which contain four quotes from Homer; subsequently it has been extended to the entire repertory of quotations from Homer present in Roman legal texts surviving in the Corpus Juris Civilis. The general purpose of the research has been to explore the theory according to such quotes would have had merely rhetorical or decorative intents, lacking whatever purpose of hermeneutical clarification. The end of the research supports the hypothesis that, on the contrary, these poetical sources would serve not only and not so much to prove the Greek origin of the Roman disciplines, but to define or clarify the contours of technical expressions (as venenum in the lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis, as analyzed in Gaius, 4 to legem XII tabularum, D. 50, 16, 236 pr., with respect to Od., 4, 230) or to illustrate special disciplines of Roman institutions with the support of the Greek quotations. This would be, therefore, a clear strategy of argumentation, introduced by Masurius Sabinus and improved by jurists of the second century b. Ch.Pubblicazioni consigliate
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