The cover image of this explorative book on the relationship between Roman law and Latin literature – the painting Ulrich Zasius (1566) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, which shows the portrait of a man whose facial part consists of two chickens and two fish – alludes to an important problem area of interdisciplinary work: walking in the borderlands of scientific disciplines bears the danger of leaving both individual disciplines unsatisfied, of being – as the saying goes – neither fish nor flesh. Just as the painting depicts this process as a successful one – for the man is recognisable to the viewer as a man –, so the book as a whole fulfils the claim of allowing the two parts of law and literature to become a sum that points beyond.
In a mixture of theoretical and exploratory groundwork and case studies that integrate Latin literature and legal texts from the leges XII tabularum and Naevius to imperial authors up until Severan times, the articles lay the foundations for introducing the established field of ‘Law and Literature’ into Classics. While doing so, the authors make it possible for readers without prior knowledge of the subject or the Latin language to follow the argument, since Latin passages are supplemented by translations and are interpreted extensively. All the articles deliver on a thorough analysis and contextualisation of their hypotheses and findings within both ancient literature and the scientific research being done in the fields of Roman law, classical philology and ancient history.
The volume consists of a detailed introduction and four thematic sections (‘Literature as Law’, ‘Literature and the Legal Tradition’, ‘Literature and Property Law’ and ‘Literature and Justice’) with a total of thirteen chapters as well as a bibliography and an index that integrates res and nomina but does not list ancient loci collectively. Notes to the articles are to be found at the respective ends. With great benefit the authors draw upon other disciplines both old and new to deepen their understanding, such as Roman rhetoric (both treatises such as Cicero's De oratore and Quintilian's magnum opus and speeches such as Cicero's Pro Archia, Verrines and Catilinarians), politics, philosophy (Plato, Aristotle), sociology (P. Bourdieu) and architecture (mainly Vitruvius’ De architectura). Legal concepts encompass sovereignty, the Roman senatus consultum ultimum (SCU), iustitium in Lucan, restitutio, ownership and possession (proprietas/possessio/propria), crime (crimen), prosecution/punishment, slavery, usucapio and manumissio as part of the Roman property law and slavery system.
To do justice to this ambitious project of (re-?)connecting the diverging paths of literature (litterae) and law (ius) and, by accomplishing that, leading to new pathways, it might be most helpful to complement and expand the overview of thematic connections of topics and concepts given in the introduction with a couple of observations for new readers and scholars of the field(s) alike. Working in the borderlands of the disciplines of literature and law, it seems only logical that the contributions repeatedly revolve around the juridical concept of the state of exception (T. Biggs with a focus on Lucan), as it was treated in the political philosophy and legal theory of Carl Schmitt (Ausnahmezustand) and later in Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer series (Stato di eccezione), pointing to the ‘paradox of legality’, the dialectic of nomos and anomia.
This is but one example of the many concepts revolving around the leitmotif of liminality: liminality between literature und law as entities (Ziogas/Bexley; M. Lowrie), the liminal character of the Rubicon-episode in Lucan (Biggs), the shore (litus) as a fundamentally liminal sphere (J. Dugan, T. McGinn), the causa Curiana as a symbol for the hermeneutical ambivalence between text and author's intentions (Dugan), M. Antistius Labeo as a liminal figure and symbol for a ‘critical juncture’ between an older and a ‘modern’ world of law and literature (M. Wibier), the emergence of the concept of authorship in Rome from the blurred boundaries between ‘theft’ (furtum) and imitatio, the concept of vindicatio in Seneca's epistulae morales as both self-appropriation and self-liberation and as a precarious relationship between possession and dispossession (E. Gunderson), the idea of transgressive carmina in Naevius, Ovid and Lucan (N. Goldschmidt) or even the figure of the zombie for ‘old white men’, who, although having written the American constitution a long time ago, are still governing the US today (N. Pandey).
Moreover, the textuality of both law and literature provides a fundamental point of reference. As becomes clear in Lowrie's article, there has always been a veritable tradition of commentary for legal and literary texts alike. Wibier points to the integral role of M. Antistius Labeo in the emergence of a legal canon, which in transcending the borders of time and space – as Pandey shows in the comparative approach to the Roman and the US constitution – proves to be influential up until our time. Dugan, in mentioning that the causa Curiana is known to us only through its textual preservation, sheds light on the importance of textuality for establishing contact with Roman antiquity.
Textuality therefore widens the horizon in matters of perception and reception. Literary texts can serve as law themselves or integrate juridical aspects into their fabric. For example, literature can involve a reader or audience as judge (iudex). This bears the question: are there exempla to be found for an audience integrated in other legal roles such as a defendant or a prosecutor? What ramifications would this entail for the field of literature and law in Classics? More broadly, literature can draw upon the legal sphere in creating trial scenes, where further work needs to be devoted to the philosophical-philological question on how these are to be understood fully in the literary area of tension between mimesis and mimicry (as noted by Bexley with regard to Seneca's Apocolocyntosis). Is bringing legal tropes into literature and vice versa first and foremost a serious matter or one of a strategy of deceiving or disguising, as Ziogas and Bexley mention prominently for Roman comedy, Cicero's Pro Caelio and in regard to the originator of sophistry, Gorgias of Leontinoi? The book proves a valuable starting point for taking on these tasks.
Furthermore, texts serve in the legal function of verdicts or evidence, both in court and as stylistic devices. Literary genres and devices being considered on several occasions are exempla, anecdotes or stories (fabulae) as well as symbols, metaphors, allegories and the synecdoche or rather pars pro toto. Taking this book as a ground line, it would be productive to have a closer look at Cicero's De legibus, which – in good Platonic tradition – gives its legal themes a narrative frame as a dialogue and (like the philosophical corpus as a whole) heavily integrates exempla, anecdotes and fabulae into the narrative and theoretical disputation. In which ways do legal and literature coalesce in this vital (albeit by Cicero later largely omitted) Roman work at the fringes of law and literature?
The aspect of materiality or embodiment (cf. pp. 117ff.; 125) of law and literature leads to multiple references to the concepts of biopolitics, biopower and body politics by M. Foucault, a thinker who casts his shadow through the mentioning of discursive spaces and the dispositive of the law and through his understanding of the author and the author function as well. From body politics it is not far to the prevalent understanding of textual literature and legality as matters of life and death, as they are discussed not only with regard to vindicatio or slavery, but also to rape and suicide in Ovid's Arachne episode (S. Alekou).
A great deal of work both as a theoretical point of reference and as a ground line for case studies is devoted to the genre of Roman comedy, specifically the surviving works of Plautus and Terence. This is not just due to the similarities between comedy and the law (precisely forensic rhetoric as mentioned by Ziogas/Bexley), but also because the time of the aforementioned comedy poets is generally regarded as the ‘heyday of Roman jurisprudence’ (J.F. Gaertner, cf. p. 97). The article by Pandey that concludes the book, in recurrence of Heidi Schreck's 2017 play What the constitution means to me, goes as far as to stage an encounter between Roman and US law in a dramatic form, with acts as headlines.
Education or rather paideia – in antiquity closely linked to rhetoric – is merely alluded to, such as in the indirect reference to Cicero's ‘Isocratean model of paideia’ (J. Oksanish) and Minerva as magistra and tutela as her ‘pedagogy’ (quotation marks by Alekou). A slight nuisance: her reference to tutela is mentioned in the index, whereas the concept in Seneca as referred to by E. Gunderson is not and would have helped for readers wanting to elaborate on the role that paideia plays in regards to tutela in Seneca as well. The relevance of paideia for the topics at hand is further emphasised in the frequently mentioned encyclopaedic writers Aulus Gellius and (to a lesser extent) Festus as a source and reference, who themselves stand in the tradition of the Greek concept of enkyklios paideia. As in Roman times, education – especially for the elites – linked a Greek heritage of grammar and rhetoric as part of the standard curriculum with the specific legal contexts of the Roman Republic, this link had huge ramifications for rhetoric as a whole and in its deliberative and forensic genera, which became rather toothless since the elite's political influence was massively reduced and recalibrated in imperial times. An entire, at the time thriving, genre at the fringes of literature and law – the declamations as educational tools for practising rhetoric in a growing fictional manner according to the loss of real political and legal influence – mirrors changes, which might be worth further exploration and seem to be a field where Classics in its methods and time-focus can provide insights of further relevance for the field of Law and Literature.
