This chapter considers how the paradigm of the imperial judge, discussed in Chapter 3, was challenged by the political unrest and legitimacy crises of the Severan period. It does so through a close analysis of rescripts attributed to the child emperor Severus Alexander. Alexander’s rescripts exhibit two unusual rhetorical tendencies. First, several of them predate Alexander’s reign and are in fact relabeled rescripts of his disgraced predecessor Elagabalus; this relabeling shows that the link between imperial authorship and legitimacy had become more tenuous in the late Severan period. Second, rescripts of Alexander are unusually likely to portray the emperor as following prior imperial precedent and especially those precedents of his Severan forebears. I argue that both maneuvers can be thought of as a response to the problems posed by child rule; while Alexander’s own judgment might not be legitimate, his rescripts paint him as a caretaker for a dynastic legal order that was.

This chapter considers how Severan jurists responded to political crisis. After describing the political dynamics that made jurists such important players in Severan administration, I discuss two rhetorical features of Severan juristic writing: Severan jurists’ tendency to describe jurisprudence in terms of its beneficial effects on the world rather than its elegance or internal morality, and their increasing use of anonymous citational forms like “emperors have written” rather than citing individual authorities by name. These maneuvers reconstructed imperial lawmaking as a static, impersonal field of knowledge and made interpretation, the job of the jurist, into the critical act that constituted Roman legality.

Roman law persists after the fall of Rome, not only governing private/business-relations, but also as the basis for the Western European legal order. When it comes down to the law the Roman Empire lived on as a virtual empire (of the imagination) more than a millennium after the actual fall of the physical empire in the West. Roman law was studied, codified and used as if the Empire was still there.