Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

able to make specialized legal texts available to his protégés. This was a world without much in the way of a book trade, especially for nonliterary works. Finding an obscure legal text was a matter of knowing the author (or knowing someone who knew the author, or someone else in the chain). Unlike the core curriculum of literature and public speaking, legal training of this sort required connections, not just money. Cicero’s connec tion to the Scaevolas was via his main mentor, Lucius Licinius Crassus (consul in 95 bc), who was a connection of his father’s (though we don’t know exactly how). Cicero’s family was very important in his small hometown, but it seems unlikely that most similarly situated young men would have had the same kind of access. In the early years of the Empire, and in one case even as far back as the reign of the very first emperor, more formal ized schools of law appear for the first time. Two were espe cially prominent: the “followers of Sabinus” and the “followers of Proculus.” We know of them both from narrative accounts and from records of particular disagreements on points of legal doctrine. It has been claimed that these were mainly “schools of thought,” but it is likely that they were educational institu tions as well. Though the names usually given (“followers of”) are ambiguous, we occasionally see references that are more explicit. The existence of a series of “heads” for both also sug gests an institutional context. Their legal disputes also seem not to have been based on any deep principles, which might also suggest that they were schools in the institutional sense, not the philosophical. Pliny the Younger, a letter writer of the early

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