The authors included in this volume were asked to revisit the traditional narratives of Roman law during the late Republic with a view to establishing whether and to what extent a greater focus on Cicero and his works would affect these. They were instructed not to treat Cicero as ‘an outsider’, but as part of a broader ‘legal culture’ of the late Republic, while at the same time remaining aware of the biases inherent in his oeuvre.

The first section of this book focused on various interrelated narratives regarding the state of Roman law during the late Republic. Thomas shows the extent to which much of the modern narrative regarding the rise of the Roman jurists and the Roman legal profession remains subtly, yet profoundly affected by notions of specialisation and intellectual isolation created at the turn of the nineteenth century in German legal scholarship. This, in turn, affects modern understanding of the significance of Republican Roman law for the emergence of classical Roman law. By counterbalancing this narrative with the evidence provided by Cicero (while at the same time making allowances for the biases present in his works), it allows the modern reader to obtain a broader, more inclusive picture and, in turn, to reflect more closely on the importance of issues such as rhetoric and of philosophy for the development of Roman law during the late Republic. This latter point finds a natural locus in the chapter of Tellegen-Couperus and Tellegen who, using an aspect of the law of succession as their example, proceed to question the commonly held belief that Stoicism was the driving force behind much of Republican Roman law. In fact, as they show, the jurists drew on a variety of philosophical influences, often also from the New Academy, when debating matters of law. This chapter, in turn, allows the modern reader to draw greater inferences regarding the impact of philosophy upon Republican Roman law, especially in light of the claims often made regarding the philosophical inclinations of some of the great Republican jurists. This insight percolates into the final chapter in this section in which Forschner grapples with the knotty issue of Cicero's ‘theory of law’.

In his 1995 book, The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, GA 1995), Alan Watson included a chapter provocatively titled ‘Cicero the outsider’. By locating this chapter towards the end of the book, Watson hinted that any discussion of Cicero in the context of the spirit of Roman law (a difficult concept in itself) could only really form part of an appendix (in this case Appendix A) to a book of this kind. The gist of this chapter, following the then dominant Romanist view, is that ‘Cicero's outlook [was] remarkably different from that of the Roman jurists’ (at 200).As this statement implies, for Watson, Cicero stood outside the traditional narrative of the Roman jurists.

This view of Cicero as ‘an outsider’ is based on two assumptions. The first is that a fundamental distinction between the ‘jurist’ and the ‘advocate’ (orator) existed in Roman law– a distinction that, according to its supporters, seems to have originated already in the mid to late Republic. Jurists were engaged in an intellectual endeavour, removed from the cut and thrust of legal practice, while orators were very much at its centre and utilised the art of persuasion (rhetoric) in courts of law, often with limited attention to (or indeed need for) the intellectual intricacies of Roman law. Such a system was made workable by the formula procedure operating in the Roman courts where the praetor and the jurists dealt with matters of law, while the lay iudex merely decided on the application of the law to the facts of the matter. The origins of this view about the perceived divide between the jurist and the orator are complex and may be traced at least to nineteenth-century German conceptions of law as a Wissenschaft, in which the ‘scientific’ study of law and those who were engaged in it were foregrounded at the expense of legal practice. This view also finds support to some extent in Cicero's own statements about the endeavours of jurists, of whom he seems at times quite critical (although these should be treated with circumspection as they were produced within a specific context).