The Roman legal legacy that shaped the West

Rome’ legal tradition may owe much of its enduring influence to a period defined by chaos rather than order.

That is the argument at the centre of Zachary Herz’s The God and the Bureaucrat, reviewed by Catherine Edwards for the Times Literary Supplement.

The early third century CE was marked by political instability – military coups, child emperors and repeated crises of legitimacy, culminating in the assassination of Alexander Severus by his own troops in 235.

Yet it was precisely during this period that Roman civil law reached a peak of sophistication, with jurists such as Ulpian, Papinian and Paul producing detailed legal opinions that would later form the backbone of Roman law compilations.

Herz’s book does not claim that Roman law reflected justice as it was actually practised. Legal historians have long noted a gap between the formal codes and the realities of Roman courts, where outcomes were often shaped by local custom and practical considerations rather than statute.

Herz’s focus instead is on how law functioned as political language – a tool emperors used to define their authority and their relationship with those they ruled.

Early emperors used legal pronouncements to project restraint and legitimacy. Augustus, for instance, publicly enforced his own adultery legislation against his daughter, exiling her to demonstrate that he was bound by the same rules as everyone else. Later emperors, including Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, used law in a similar way, presenting themselves as attentive guardians of justice and public welfare.

By the third century, Herz argues, that link between imperial authority and legal legitimacy had weakened considerably. As emperors’ own standing became less secure, it was the legal experts – rather than the emperors themselves – who increasingly came to represent order and continuity. Ulpian himself would meet a violent end, killed by the Praetorian Guard within the imperial palace.

The idea of Roman law as a coherent, principled system survived its authors, however. It was revived and formalised under the sixth-century emperor Justinian, whose compilations treated the jurists of the Severan period with something close to reverence and presented Roman law as a fixed, systematic body of rules. That version of Roman law became the foundation for numerous later European legal systems and remains central to how the subject is studied today, often stripped of the political turmoil in which it originated.

Herz’s broader point is that this idealised picture of Roman law – rational, stable, oriented towards fairness – was in many ways a product of the very instability it appeared to transcend. Yet the appeal of that ideal proved durable well beyond antiquity: even Adolf Hitler, in 1920, framed his opposition to what he called “cosmopolitan” Roman law as part of his broader political programme, an indication of how potent a symbol of ordered legal authority it had remained.