Insegnare l’unità del genere umano in un mondo in guerra. Il nemico. Il barbaro, il prigioniero nella crisi del III secolo.

In the 3rd century AD, barbarian raids gradually worsened with the Alemanni, the Iutungi, and other northern peoples, in a world that was by then plagued by an unprecedented economic, demographic, cultural-religious, and institutional crisis: from that time on, accession to the imperial throne began to depend on the shifting fortunes of the various factions of the army that supported their respective generals, and many of the emperors of the Severian dynasty fell precisely during military campaigns on the empire’s borders. While this grave situation of uncertainty is described in great detail by contemporary historians Cassius Dio and Herodian, it generally does not emerge in the fragments of the legal works of the era contained in Justinian’s Digesta and the imperial constitutions of the Codex, which were also drafted by the jurists of the consilium principis: this is not surprising given that such writings, especially those of a private law nature, had a highly technical-legal significance and generally disregarded the historical-political context of their era. It is surprising, however, that despite the widespread fear of the barbarians and their dangerous incursions along the empire’s limes (and beyond), the jurists featured in the Digesta in the third century CE chose on multiple occasions to emphasize the principle of the unity of the human kind, without distinction between Roman and barbarian, free and slave, citizen and foreigner. Not only that, but this principle, which is closely related to that—particularly emphasized by jurists of this era—of the unnaturalness of slavery in the face of the natural freedom of all men, is expressed above all in institutional manuals, particularly in introductory texts, often interwoven with ethical-philosophical observations. This vision appears, for example, in highly renowned authors who rose to the highest highest positions in the imperial administration, such as Paulus and Ulpianus, but its champion is certainly Florentinus, a jurist known, like Gaius, by his nomen alone, who must have practiced, in some part of the empire, the profession of teacher.