Culture and Law Part 2 – Greco-Roman Law

Apollinian Law is distinguishable from Faustian Law by the people whom it serves. Living within a city-state did not necessarily result in your citizenship of the city. In Greece, you would have “persona” which, with your body, formed your participation in the polis, and would be used to measure downwards into lesser things, and upwards into Gods. For example, a slave was a body but was not considered to have persona and was therefore not part of the wider political soma, and upwards we find those who ascended to Godhood such as Alexander or Julius Caesar who came to possess mythological significance through the Classical world. Citizenship could also be revoked in the act of capitis deminutio, where a citizen may lose his persona, along with all his rights, and live on as merely a body, a blood cell without a host (think matter without form).

The most glaring thing to note about Classical law however was that it was entirely empirical. Our law is conducted based upon precedent established before the ongoing case, using truths where we may before resorting to facts, and adding the finished verdict to the ever-expanding library of case law. But this was avoided in the city-states and instead relied on a political generalist’s experience rather than the precise experience of career lawyers and judges. When a public figure gave his declarations as praetor in Rome, he did this with a lifetime of experiences in a wide selection of fields and was thus guided not by a history of law but on a case-by-case basis, an expression of their stoic attitudes whether they knew it or not. This momentary nature of each case extended to the very characters of the praetors elected to office, who would often, each year, declare the rules and procedures they would work by, thus potentially resulting in a rollercoaster of varying verdicts with each year. But no stock of laws was to be made, and thus it existed case by case, year by year, and, if they could get away with it, moment by moment, and this would extend to each Greek city state as well which had as diverse a character of law and politics as to call into question the term “Greek and Roman Law” in the first place.

Of the constitutions and legal codes set out in spite of this theory, of the codes attributed to Lycurgus and Dracon and various Roman kings in sagas, of Solon and Pittacus in the 500s, it would be typical of a Western mindset to declare them the foundations of anything more similar to English law as opposed to the simpler fact that these are merely declarations of power. Controlling the law anywhere allows you to manifest your ideals, and in Greece and Rome it is no less significant. Of Dracon’s laws and those of the Decemvirs in Rome, laws were political acts for the oligarchy, whereas for Solon it meant political acts for the demos and the two acted as figureheads throughout the ages for the two parties of people.

In the case of Rome, we may see that Tacitus considered the Decemvirs the end of “right law”, as the following “Tribune” of ten more lawmakers following its fall received an endless crusade of undermining from the “lex rogata”, the people’s law, and corresponds to the affairs of Solon’s crusade against Dracon in Athens and the whole of the Athenian push for Democracy. When Rome fully matured into a civilization city-state, we find next to the lex rogata the lex data, administrator’s law of the praetor, which all but erases the Twelve Tables in Rome as it quickly became the center of Rome’s legal infrastructure and spun itself a variety of laws pertaining to other city-states in the Praetor’s Jus Gentium, the law of the alien. Because Rome was swiftly becoming an empire, most city-states and small settlements became subject to these rules established in Rome. In 130AD, Hadrian published the edictum perpetuum, which all but petrified Roman law as despite Praetors’ ability to still declare their law of the year, they were ultimately and eternally subject to the written imperial texts.

To summarize, Classical Law is a law of the moment, judges would be derived from those with a wide history of personal experiences in order to weigh in on what were generally observed as common and recurring events which warranted no further examination of legal nuances. They, therefore, didn’t spend their time building masses of case law but focused instead on the character of those who should be fit to declare legal decisions. Spengler considers Law to be Apollinian culture’s only systematic science, beginning right after Archimedes rounded off mathematics and was developed up until its perfection in 130, after which it steadily and alchemically transmuted itself into a religious law of the East to observe the springtime of Magian culture.