Abstract
In the first of the three sections making up the central part of his textbook, theEnchiridion (written in the 2nd century AD), Pomponius sets out to present the birth(origo), then the progress(processus) of law(D., 1, 2, 2). In the beginning was Chaos : if, in the physical universe, chaos was conceived as a " heap of disparate germs of the elements of things ", in the legal universe imagined by Pomponius, initial chaos corresponds to the absence of laws. If the world is born from the differentiation of elements, it was Romulus who, by dividing the people into thirty curies able to express their will, made legislation possible. It's a kind of nomogony, in the same tone as the cosmogony found in Ovid(Met., 1, 1-25). For Pomponius, the creation of thirty curies established the people as the main protagonists of civic life. While the etymology of curia is probably " cum + vir ", the jurist proposes that of cura (Romulus " thus took care " of the city through the council of curies) : this enables Pomponius to give an initial legal notion : leges curiatae are laws passed by the people, the curies, on the proposal of the king. It's a definition given in the form of a story.
Pomponius thus proposes a small nomogony, made up of names, anecdotes and a people who become masters of themselves through the lex. But Pomponius' manual is also punctuated by definitions, in the form of a historical narrative : the story makes the definitions easy to memorize, so that the manual fulfills its pedagogical function.
