Rights Natural or Manmade? Section I. Part III Part III

Part III

The Origin of Rights (Human); a Roman Perspective; Section I.
Although many aspects of ancient Greek culture continued to influence Roman Empire from the 1st century BCE onward, law was not one of them. Nevertheless, Rome established novel legal forms and institutions as well as the first legal professionals and bureaucracy. Roman judges created the initial procedures of “legal science,” and invented the category of legal writing in service of this discipline, in which judges collected and consolidated Roman law according to complex classifications; a practice that culminated in the Digesta (Digest), that would be assembled by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565 CE). The work ultimately served as the basis for the contemporary legal systems of the West. However, where Greek law diminished in impact, the Greek legacy in the philosophy of law endured for several more centuries, extending on through the Middle Ages, during which many refinements and extensions of themes and ideas, occurred principally within the Christian tradition. But it was the Roman judge and philosopher Cicero (106–43 BCE) who expressed the first and definitive conception of what is known today as “natural law.”
Although Cicero was a legal expert and knowledgeable in positive law (human-enacted) in the Roman state, he sought to place it in relation to what he judged unbiased moral truths, which he called “laws”. In De republica (On the Republic), he famously echoed Sophocles, by stating: “true law is the [true] reason in agreement with nature…to curtail this law is impious, to amend it illicit, to repeal it impossible…nor will it be one law at Rome and a different one at Athens, but one and the same Law, eternal and unchangeable”. His perception of law was fixed in reasonably stringent moral circumstances that putative positive (human-created) law must meet in order to qualify as real law: “Those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but ‘laws.’ ” Cicero’s conception was that there are moral criterion for defining the cogency of positive law, and in the centuries that would follow, it would grow in prevalence. St. Augustine of Hippo’s (354–430 CE) latter clear and direct claim that “an unjust law does not seem to be a law at all” would for centuries function as the motto for natural-law, and despite the claims of detractors that it was vague or conflicting, it has begun to make a meaningful comeback in the twenty-first century.
Cicero left a sizeable written legacy, and within that legacy he gave far-reaching attentiveness to a natural and comprehensive basis of justice and right. In fact, his treatise on the natural foundation of right is his most meaningful contribution to both moral and political thought, for it came at a critical juncture where his ideal undertook the words of natural law that carried out a direct and formative influence on leading thinkers from the first centuries of Christianity through to the Renaissance.