Marcus Antistius Labeo and the Idea of Legal Literature

This chapter explores the reception of the jurist and scholar Marcus Antistius Labeo (fl. under Augustus) by authors of the Early Empire. Focusing on assessments of Labeo’s role in legal and wider intellectual history, I argue that Labeo functioned as a vehicle for later authors to think through complex questions about the relationship between law, literary production, and politics. On the one hand, the surviving biographical anecdotes can all be read as raising questions about who is in control of the legal universe with the rise of the new power structure known as the Principate. On the other hand, an analysis of Labeo’s treatment by the encyclopaedic writer Gellius and by the Roman jurists shows that Labeo the author made critical contributions to the law at a turning point in legal history. While for Gellius he symbolizes the endpoint of a tradition in which legal and literary scholarship largely coincided, the jurists treat Labeo as foundational for a more distinct, technical-legal discourse at some remove from literary production. As mentioned, this chapter examines attitudes towards Labeo’s significance; it does not provide a detailed analysis of the influence of Labeo’s doctrinal contributions to Roman law on later jurists.