"The Roman Code was merely an enunciation in words of the existing customs of the Roman people"
About this Quote
There is a quietly destabilizing move in Maine's line: he shrinks the majesty of "The Roman Code" down to a clerical act. "Merely an enunciation in words" demotes law from sacred command to transcript. The intent is polemical in the Victorian scholar's way, aimed at puncturing the myth that societies are built by brilliant lawmakers handing down rules from on high. Maine wants you to see legal codes as after-the-fact paperwork for habits already doing the real governing.
The subtext is an argument about where authority lives. If code is only the verbalization of custom, then legitimacy flows upward from lived practice, not downward from institutions. That undermines the romantic picture of Rome (and, by implication, modern Europe) as a civilization engineered by rational jurists. It also smuggles in a comparative-anthropological claim: "advanced" written law is not the opposite of tradition; it's tradition made legible, standardized, and enforceable at scale.
Context matters. Maine is writing in an era obsessed with origins - of language, religion, the state - and deeply invested in empire and administration. His broader project in Ancient Law was to describe a movement from status to contract, from kinship obligation to individual agreement. This sentence fits that evolutionary frame: early law is indistinguishable from social norm, and codification happens when a society needs to fix, export, or adjudicate those norms beyond the small circle of communal memory.
The line works because it doubles as critique. By calling codification "merely" enunciation, Maine warns that writing law doesn't necessarily modernize a society; it can just fossilize power relations already embedded in custom, now protected by the prestige of text.
The subtext is an argument about where authority lives. If code is only the verbalization of custom, then legitimacy flows upward from lived practice, not downward from institutions. That undermines the romantic picture of Rome (and, by implication, modern Europe) as a civilization engineered by rational jurists. It also smuggles in a comparative-anthropological claim: "advanced" written law is not the opposite of tradition; it's tradition made legible, standardized, and enforceable at scale.
Context matters. Maine is writing in an era obsessed with origins - of language, religion, the state - and deeply invested in empire and administration. His broader project in Ancient Law was to describe a movement from status to contract, from kinship obligation to individual agreement. This sentence fits that evolutionary frame: early law is indistinguishable from social norm, and codification happens when a society needs to fix, export, or adjudicate those norms beyond the small circle of communal memory.
The line works because it doubles as critique. By calling codification "merely" enunciation, Maine warns that writing law doesn't necessarily modernize a society; it can just fossilize power relations already embedded in custom, now protected by the prestige of text.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society (1861) — Maine discusses the Roman Code as an enunciation in words of existing Roman customs in this work. |
More Quotes by Henry
Add to List
