| Pomponius was a famous Roman jurist in the 2 century AD, a teacher of law and a prolific writer. He never held a public office in his life but devoted himself to the study of law. One of his works is the Enchiridium (An Introduction to the History of Law), which is probably the first and only extant work focusing on the Roman legal history, however only preserved and excerpted in the Digesta (part of the Justinian law code compilation, the Corpus Iuris Civilis). This small piece benefits us to study the history of Roman law, however from a certain juridical perspective.The text is very concise in the extant version, and scholars have not paid much attention to it. It consists of three parts:the origin and development of Roman law; the beginning and development of magistrates and their (jurisdictional) power in ancient Rome, and the sequence of Roman jurists.In my thesis, I give a Chinese translation of the text and extensive notes for enriching the laconic text by analyzing the structure of language, rhetoric devices as well as by giving historical background information. In addition, compared with the works of Livy and other classical authors and historiographers, I attempt to give some views on Pomponius’s text as a piece of historiography from the point of view of a jurist in the Roman Empire. |
