When we refer to Rome's legal past, we are usually concerned with the evolution of Roman law over the long period from the city's foundation in the 8th century BC, to the reign of Justinian in the 6th century AD. The lecture proposed looking at things from the opposite perspective. Instead, we asked how the Romans themselves conceived of their own legal past. This position corresponds to the conviction that the best way to do legal history (or perhaps to do history at all) is to identify with the point of view of the protagonists, in our case, the Ancients, to strive to see the world as they themselves saw it.
Which Ancients ? The most sought-after witnesses during the lecture were the Roman jurists, but other authors were also taken into consideration, following the idea that legal culture can only be understood by inserting it into the framework of ancient civilization, in close discursive fields. This is why the lecture also explored the conceptions of a number of Greek authors - Hesiod, Aratos of Soles - and Roman poets who took up their ideas, such as Ovid, or a philosopher like Epicurus and his Roman interpreter Lucretius. With their infinite variations, Greco-Roman ideas on the origin of law were embedded in a more general vision of human history : a descending vision, from the Golden Age to the Iron Age, already traced by Hesiod and then by Aratos, and an ascending vision, which sees man emancipating himself from a savage state of life and " civilizing " himself through law. Although in different forms, these two conceptions link the birth of law to the need to curb man's negative instincts, which produce, in one case, a fall back to the savage state, in the other - after emerging from this state - a degeneration linked to the growing importance of luxury and technology.
As for themes, the lecture was devoted as much to the birth of law in general as to the genesis of particular institutions, notably private law.
Last but not least, each text was probed to discover the function of the historical reminder. Jurists transform the past when they insert it into their discourse. Often, this is a use of legal history that starts from the present and imagines a past to explain the present itself ; history is thus a pedagogical tool. The use of the past takes on its strongest dimension when it serves to argue, to support specific decisions. In any case, uncovering how the Ancients used their past enables us to grasp their mentality, then better verify the reliability of the information they give us about their history, and also to develop a critical eye on the uses of the past that every society, even contemporary ones, does not give up indulging in.