Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

persons of lower status (including slaves and former slaves). Is it really likely that prominent men, many of them holders of public offices, including the consulship, would have been regular lecturers? There was some change in the general pat tern in the first century. The emperor Vespasian created public professors of rhetoric in the 70s. Moreover, this establishment can be seen in the context of the creation of a whole range of salaried imperial offices during this period. The status of these positions is ambiguous. On the one hand, the connection to the center of power elevates them. On the other, the formal dependency on the emperor limits it. Thus these positions were normally held not by the highest social class (the senators), but by the next group down (equestrians; see Chapter 6 for more on the distinction). Now, we also know that jurists of the earlier Empire were more likely to come from this second class than jurists of the late Republic. Yet among the purported heads of the two schools, a few were from distinguished families, and most came to hold the consulship. Thus, whatever their ori gins, they would likely have felt that they’d moved up in the world. In this context, one of these teaching positions would amount to a demotion for many of these elite jurists, or at least an unwanted reminder of earlier days. And at any rate, state professorships of law did not come into being until well after those for rhetoric. It has been plausibly suggested that formal instruction in the early Imperial law schools would have been in the hands of a lower tier of jurists whose names are now lost. Moreover, the need for numbers would in any case require us to assume that

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