The Late Roman Republic: The Inception of Metaphysical Abstractness

This chapter identifies the origins of scientia iuris with the inception of juristic activities in the Late Roman Republic. In so doing, it offers a historical and philosophical contextualisation of some key claims which have been made about the relationship between Greek philosophy (i.e. metaphysics) and Roman culture and juridical thinking. Thereafter, the chapter examines the thought of Aldo Schiavone on the metaphysics of Roman jurisprudence from the perspective of Emanuele Severino’s scholarship on Prometheus Bound. It then concludes with some considerations on the biopolitical substratum of the linguistic-ontological draining of experience characterising Roman jurisprudence.