Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

by Robert Hughes

The code of law was not simply a code of power, and this made all the difference between Roman law and its more primitive antecedents. “Justice,” wrote the jurist Ulpian (Domitius Ulpianus, d. 228 C.E.), “is a constant, unfailing disposition to give everyone his legal due. The principles of law are these: to live uprightly, not to injure another man, to give every man his due. To be learned in the law is the knowledge of things divine and human, the science of the just and the unjust.” Law was the god in the codex.