Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

450 16. state, lordship and community in the west
(b) Law
That a sense of legal community should play a similarly important role in
the new realms was a further adaptation of Roman heritage. Ideologically,
the Roman educated classes saw written law as the main factor
differentiating their society from that of ‘barbarians’ beyond the frontier.
In the Roman view, only men who had graduated to the higher level of
rationality generated by a classical education (whether in Latin or Greek)
were able to subordinate their immediate desires to a legal structure which
treated all alike and which, by that fact, achieved the best possible outcome
for all. Nor was law – in imperial circles, at least – seen as something created
by men for human convenience. Rather, it was essential to the divine plan
for the cosmos, since it was both cause and effect of realizing that state of
higher rationality which was the Divinity’s overall aim for humanity. The
Christianization of the empire merely heightened the religious significance
attached to written law as the generator of ‘correct’ social order – the powerful
example of the Old Testament reinforcing established Roman views.
By contrast, ‘barbarian’ societies, where divinely-inspired written law failed
to prevail, were anarchies, where individuals pursued immediate sensory
pleasure, living more like animals than men. 44
Some vestiges of this ideology influenced most successor states. Most
obviously, it stimulated the production of written legal texts for groups
who had not previously possessed them. Visigoths, Burgundians, Franks,
Anglo-Saxons and Lombards all produced written legal texts through
direct or indirect contact with Roman example. In part, written law could
be used to emphasize the legal role of monarchs, enhancing kingship, but
written texts also demonstrated that the group concerned were not mere
‘barbarians’. The Ostrogothic king Theoderic made the same claim by not
producing a separate Ostrogothic law code, since he could present his
regime as preserving Roman law unchanged.
In some successor states, this ideological heritage found more profound
expression in an overt public approach taken to law. Since law, after the
Roman example, symbolized divinely ordained social order and consensus,
both the rhetoric in which texts were couched and the ceremonies surrounding
their publication reflected these ideas. Prefaces to the many law
codes generated in the new states commonly refer to the deep care for the
kingdom on the part of king and great men – religious and other –
expressed in the act of producing a text. Examples of such language can
be found in Burgundian, Lombard and Visigothic texts amongst others,
44 In more detail, with primary refs.: Heather (1993) 324, 329–30. Hence law figures centrally in late
antique comparisons of Roman and barbarian: Orosius’ account of Athaulf (Hist. ad Pag. vii.42.3–3:
he could not replace Romania with Gothia because the Goths were too uncivilized to obey law), and
Priscus’ conversation with the Roman merchant turned Hunnic warrior (the latter finally agrees, in tears
that written law guarantees the superiority of Roman life: ed. Blockley fr. 11.2, p.272, lines 508–10).
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