Letters of the Law: Saturninus the Helmsman, Pliny and Friends’ Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.15 (2/12/13)
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Jill Harries: ‘Letters of the Law: Saturninus the helmsman, Pliny and Friends’ Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.15 (2/12/13) Letters of the law: Saturninus the helmsman, Pliny and Friends. Sailors should be wary of trusting other sailors. This was the moral to be drawn from an exchange of letters late in the first century CE between a lawyer and a (now) anonymous client. The text, corrupted by centuries of manuscript transmission now lost to the record, prior to its incorporation in Justinian’s Digest of Roman Law in 533 CE, derives from the eleventh book in a collection of Epistulae compiled by Pliny’s distinguished older contemporary, Iavolenus Priscus, consul under Domitian and famous as a iuris peritus, a ‘man skilled in law’ or jurist: Anonymous (we do not know the writer’s name) to his friend Priscus greetings (Anonymus Prisco suo salutem), [Seius] Saturninus the chief helmsman from the British fleet left in his will an inheritance in trust to his heir-executor Valerius Maximus, the ship’s captain, whom he requested to restore the inheritance to his son [Seius] Oceanus, when he had reached the age of sixteen. [Seius] Oceanus, before he reached the stated age, died; now, one Mallius Seneca, who says he is the uncle of [Seius] Oceanus, is claiming these goods on the grounds of close kinship, but Maximus the ship’s captain claims them for himself, because the person to whom he had been instructed to restore the property is now deceased. [I ask therefore] Do these goods belong to Valerius Maximus the captain and heir in trust or to Mallius Seneca, who says he is the uncle of the dead boy? Priscus to his friend Anonymous greeting (Priscus Anonymo suo salutem): [I replied] If [Seius] Oceanus, to whom the inheritance left in trust by the will of [Seius] Saturninus should have been restored when he reached the age of sixteen by Valerius Maximus, the heir in trust, then died before he had reached that term of his age, the inheritance held in trust belongs to the person to whom the rest of Ocaenus’ estate belongs…(grounds for decision are highly technical)1 1Dig. 36.1.48 (greetings formula not in the Latin not included) Seius Saturninus archigubernus ex classe Britannica testamento fiduciarium reliquit heredem Valerium Maximum trierarchum, quo petit, ut filio suo Seio Oceano, cum ad annos sedecim pervenisset, hereditatem restitueret. Seius Oceanus antequam impleret annos, defunctus est; nunc Mallius Seneca, qui se avunculum Seii Oceani dicit, proximitatis nomine haec bona petit, Maximus autem trierarchus sibi se vindicet, ideo quia defunctus est is cui restituere iussus erat. [quaero ergo] utrum haec bona ad Valerium Maximum trierarchum heredem fiduciarium pertineant an ad Malliium Senecam, qui se pueri defuncti avunculum esse dicit. [respondi] si Seius Oceanus, cui fideicommissa hereditas ex testament Seii Saturni, cum annos sedecim haberet a Valerio Maximo fiduciario herede restitui debeat, pruisquam praefinitum tempus aetatis impleret, decessit, fiduciaria hereditas ad eum pertinent, ad quem cetera bona Oceani pertinuerint.. 1 Jill Harries: ‘Letters of the Law: Saturninus the helmsman, Pliny and Friends’ Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.15 (2/12/13) The text supplied above features some minor but significant departures from the version in the Digest. The most important of these, the restoration in italics of the epistolary greetings formula, not present in the text as we have it, is justified by the source reference to Epistulae 11 supplied by the Digest compilers: one characteristic of letters is that they are headed by a greeting from the sender to the recipient and there is no reason to assume that these were, in their original form, exceptional. The square bracketing of “I asked, therefore” and “I replied”, and of the nomen Seius reflects probable modifications by later jurists, who adapted the original letter form to the Q & A format of the Quaestio, question- form used in problem literature; and who had a professional liking for Seius as an imaginary character used for purposes of case discussion. The exchange on Saturninus’ will is a business correspondence. There are no literary flourishes; the relevant facts of the case and the Anonymous’ options, as he saw them, are presented for Priscus’ opinion. The use of ‘nunc’ (now) and the present tenses show the case is under current consideration. Priscus’ opinion could be no more than advisory but, given his standing as an ex-consul, would be potentially decisive, if cited before an adjudicator. The Anonymous himself clearly had reservations about the claims of Mallius, whose name suggests an uncle on the mother’s side; despite his allegations of proximitas, he would have had little claim under the laws of intestate succession, which favoured claimants descended from a common male ancestor (agnates). Priscus, however, simplified matters by dismissing both claims in favour of the (unknown) owner of the rest of Oceanus’ property. Business correspondence is pedestrian stuff, but this alone does not explain why the voluminous, albeit fragmentary, dossiers of lawyer-letters have been so systematically ignored by cultural historians. Part of the problem is the form in which the letters are preserved. In addition to the textual tampering noted in Saturninus’ case, the survival, in fragmentary form of the multi-book treatises and commentaries on Roman law of the iuris periti contemporary with the younger Pliny is due largely to Justinian, who ordered his legal administrators to collect and select extracts from legal writers to create his definitive statement of juristic law, the Digest (533 CE). In the Digest, where material was arranged by topic, not author, the individual identities of the long-dead ‘contributors’ were subsumed by the overall purpose of the compilation, to serve as a teaching book and a reference book for lawyers in courtrooms. In the 1880s, the German scholar, Otto Lenel, reassembled the juristic fragments and other testimonia to create a Palingenesia of legal authors, thus enabling them to be read in terms of authorial style and agendas. For this reason, it is Lenel, not the Digest, who is the sourcebook for what follows, although Digest referencing will be used, in accordance with general convention. Justinian’s compilers employed a referencing system for each extract, consisting of author, book title and book number (e.g. for the Saturninus case, Iavolenus Priscus, Epistulae 11). It is thus possible to identify the authors and titles of numerous now largely lost works on law. These included a number of citations from and references to books of Epistulae, by lawyers from the time of Augustus 2 Jill Harries: ‘Letters of the Law: Saturninus the helmsman, Pliny and Friends’ Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.15 (2/12/13) to the mid second century, when they seem to have abandoned the letter form as redundant for their purposes.2 Many such citations from letter collections are at second hand, (printed by Lenel in italics). However, as we have seen, even those texts, which purport to derive directly from a first or early second-century author were reworked at various points unknown over the succeeding centuries, either by the authors themselves or at a later stage in the transmission of the text, prior to its incorporation in the Digest.3 These problems with textual transmission affect our ability to identify letters not explicitly referenced as such, and will be discussed separately below. Lawyers’ letters and the younger Pliny On what literary grounds, should the lawyers’ letter collections be discussed as relevant to the Epistulae of Pliny? As Roy Gibson stated, in his analysis of how a ‘letter’ should be recognised: ‘often the epistolary character of an individual text is guaranteed by its place within a larger group of epistolary texts, such as a letter collection…The importance of the letter collection, then, to guiding the reader as to the need to read its constituent texts as letters cannot be underestimated’.4 It follows that if lawyers chose to publish work as Epistulae, they intended to signal some kind of a generic identity with other letter- collections – and that the authors of other published Epistulae may also have interacted with them. Nor should an element of competition be ruled out. Whatever the dates of publication of Pliny’s books of Epistulae, they postdate those of Proculus (mid to late first century CE) and Priscus, and perhaps those of Iuventius Celsus as well. Pliny, therefore, would have been aware of their work, when publishing his own. Lawyers’ letters did not count as letters only because they were collected and labelled as such. Criteria suggested by modern scholars for what a letter should consist of include that it is a written message from one person or group to another, which must be set down in a material form and requires to be conveyed from sender to recipient, who are physically separate and distanced from each other. Its identity as a ‘letter’ is signalled by the inclusion of a greeting formula 2 The earliest known jurist-author of Epistulae is Antistius Labeo, praetor under Augustus, whose Epistulae (number of books uncertain) are cited at Dig. 41.3.30.1; cf. also Gell. NA 13.13.2 (correspondence between Labeo and Ateius Capito, consul 5 CE). The second is Proculus (eleven or more books) credited in the second century with being the leader of one of Rome’s two rival law schools. His precise dates (and other names) are uncertain. 3 The extent of editorial intervention by Justinian’s lawyers is controversial; my view (which I believe is that of modern legal scholars in general) is that hypotheses of interpolations by the compilers should be rejected, unless there is incontrovertible evidence for their existence.