The Gradual Disappearance of the Professional Jurist
At first sight it would seem to require a great effort to imagine an age without jurists. The idea becomes more comprehensible, however, if we heed Emperor Theodosius II and a passage in the constitution ccDe auctoritate Codicis” that prefaced the Codex of 438.
The emperor says of jurists that “there are seldom any who have full command [scientia] of civil law,” adding, “among so many dreary, bungling lucubrations it is difficult to find anyone who has received solid and complete doctrines.”[37]In the Western Roman Empire in a.d. 438 events had not yet reached the precipitous climax of the deposition of Romulus Au- gustulus in 476. Thus Theodosius was speaking of the lands that are now Europe.
We know that at the time there were vast stretches of thinly populated territories on the European continent, that civil life had shrunk to within a few cities, and that in rural areas, which were sometimes dominated by a town or an urban settlement, tradition governed the pace of work unless the peace was disturbed by bands of brigands on occasion joined by miscreant monks of dubious morality, utter vagabonds, and savage forest-dwellers. We know that the average lifespan was short and that people were considered lucky to live beyond the age of forty; that illiteracy was the rule; that even a king—Theodoric, for example—found it difficult to write so much as the first letter of his name; and that everywhere hunger, brought on by famine, destitution, or ravaging armies, and death by sporadic epidemics or devastating plagues made simple survival the most urgent problem.
Only a few cities could lay claim to any splendor: Ravenna was first among these, followed by other cities of the coasts of the Adriatic (Rimini, Ancona) or the Ionian Sea (Otranto). Cities outside Italy included Marseilles, Arles, and Toulouse in southern France, Lyons in Burgundy, Toledo, Saragossa, and Seville on the Iberian Peninsula.
Rome was in full decline. The Senate, reduced to a shadow of its former power, was withering away, its horizons narrowed to local and provincial matters. The time when the voices raised in the Senate represented the most vital forces in the entire empire was only a memory. The cultural elites were in total collapse. In 533 there were perhaps three professors (one of them a jurist), all poorly paid if at all, if we can take Cassiodorus’s word for it.[38]
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