312 HISTORY OF ROMAN LAW 



for us not only by the Code and Digest, but by famous Roman 

 works of art both in bronze and in marble. To Septimius Severus we 

 owe a splendid arch, to Caracalla the remains of still more splendid 

 public baths; and it should be remembered that Julia Domna, the 

 wife of the former and the mother of the latter emperor, brought 

 together in her brilliant salon, not only the best philosophers, orators, 

 scholars, poets, and artists that the world could then produce, but 

 also the greatest of Roman jurists, Paulus, Ulpian, and Papinian. 1 

 By the time of Constantine we note a decline in artistic no less than 

 in legal achievement. Again, when legal activity revives under 

 Justinian the codifier and reformer, we have his superb and well- 

 preserved architecture at Ravenna and Constantinople to set beside 

 his even more enduring legal monuments. After him both art and 

 law fall into a kind of lethargy, until again, and surely not by accident, 

 the legal revival during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth 

 centuries takes place in the same wonderful period which produced 

 the early Italian artists. And once again a second renewal of interest 

 in the study of Roman law, with which the great Cujas is identified, 

 coincides with the revival of classic art in the Renaissance. There 

 seems, in short, to have been a sort of tidal movement in the European 

 mind, by which the history of art and that of law have equally been 

 affected. 



When we come to consider the legal allusions in art, for the under- 

 standing of which a knowledge of legal history is requisite, we stand 

 on ground less easy to survey. For here we find nothing but isolated 

 details, each of which has to be separately examined. A knowledge 

 of legal history is sometimes useful in clearing up a question of 

 ancient architecture. Thus the basilica found in Domitian's palace 

 on the Palatine could not be appreciated unless we kneAv the Em- 

 peror's legal position as final court of appeal. Similarly, the churches 

 built in the catacombs could not be understood unless we knew that 

 the law forbade burial inside Rome, while it also protected all resting- 

 places of the dead, and that it thus quite unintentionally pointed out 

 the catacombs as excellent sanctuaries for a persecuted sect. Some- 

 times the history of Roman law may help us to understand sculpture. 

 In Bologna, Padua, and even Siena we find wonderful semi-regal 

 tombs erected to the memory of thirteenth or fourteenth century 

 jurists. They stand in a public place covered with splendid canopies 

 of stone, or they rest against the wall of a church, each decorated 

 with a marble bas-relief which represents the great scholar sitting, 

 book in hand, giving a lecture to his class of pupils. These beautiful 

 monuments would mean but little to us, unless we knew from legal 

 history how great was the fame in his own day of an Accursius or 

 a Bartolommeo di Saliceto, and how the revival of civil law in Italy 

 1 Rfrville, La Religion a Rome sous les Severes, p. 201. 



