THE CULMINATION OF CLASSICAL JURISPRUDENCE

At the beginning of the third century, the Emperor Antoninus Caracalla enacted a significant edict which had the effect of turning most of the residents of his empire into Roman citizens, whether they liked it or not.

The classical period reached its climax, in the decade after the Cnastitstin Aatnaiaiaaa, in the work of three jurists whom later ages were to consider the most distinguished, Papinian, Paul and Ulpian. Each of them held the highest imperial office, that of praetorian prefect, and was both the emperor's principal legal officer and his chief of staff. They all wrote prolifically on the law. Papinian excelled in the analysis of partic­ular cases and his solutions to legal problems show a keen moral sense and a desire to reach a just result. Paul and Ulpian are known for their great commentaries, which synthesised the work of their predecessors and passed it on in a mature, but still very complex form, to later gener­ations.

In an elementary institutional work, Ulpian made for the first time a clear distinction between private law and public law. Hitherto the phrase ‘public law' had no precise meaning and was often used to indicate those civil law rules which could not be altered by private agreement, by con­trast with those that could be altered by the parties. Ulpian now applied the term to the law that was primarily of public concern, such as the powers of magistrates and the state religion, by contrast with the law that concerned the interests of private individuals.

With the murder of Ulpian, at the hands of mutinous guards, in 223 ad (Papinian had been executed on the orders of Caracalla a decade earlier), the classical period ended. The second century ad had been a period of unusual peace and stability for the Roman empire. The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon called it ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous' (Deuliae aad Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 3). The third century, by contrast, was a period of considerable social dis­order. Although the imperial rescripts show that efforts were made, at least in the imperial chancery, to maintain the standards of the earlier law, there was little legal writing of the quality needed to justify a claim of vitality in the law.