Abstract
TheEnchiridion of Pomponius is a work which, under the guise of an account of the history of Roman law, reveals a very careful narrative strategy. Three fragments have been preserved: an introduction on the notion of ius, a passage on the origin and progress of law (itself tripartite : origin of ius, names and origins of magistracies, succession of jurists), and a glossary of legal terms(D., 1, 1, 2; D., 1, 2, 2; D., 50, 16, 239). His aim, as highlighted in the previous lecture, is to provide young readers, students of law, with technical terminology, making this manual as a whole an immense lexicon. Pomponius also proposes "dynamic " definitions, based on a historical account that he condenses into a definition (as in the case of royal laws).
But Pomponius also proposes another underlying scheme : a nomogony that establishes, after a period void of law - represented as a kind of chaos - a society provided with laws and concerned with legal security. After the expulsion of the kings, a period of chaos and uncertainty returns, before the Decemvirs and the Law of the Twelve Tables (5th c. BC). In Pomponius' narrative, the inducing factor of narrative tension becomes the growth of the city, which reaches a certain measure, a modus, a critical threshold that calls for institutional transformation. The jurist's narrative is henceforth punctuated by the stages of this growth of the city, which generates a demand for legal security, for the predictability of the law to ensure the stability of human relations. The Twelve Tables, in 451-450, are a decisive moment in this process for the stability of the city : a new beginning, this time definitive, which in turn gives rise to the need for experts, the jurists. The subsequent growth of the city (at the time of the First and Second Punic Wars) made it necessary to transmit " the care of the affairs of the republic to the senate ". In an inversely proportional relationship, in Pomponius' thinking, legal certainty requires that the more the number of citizens increases, the more it is necessary to reduce the number of those involved in the management of the res publica and the production of law. The denouement approaches : that power should be entrusted to the prince is the inescapable end of Pomponius' narrative, which thus joins Tacitus(Ann., 1, 2, 2), whose work the jurist had well in mind. This almost geometric narrative organized by Pomponius has a pedagogical objective : to teach students the fundamental notions of law, presented in narrative form.
