This chapter offers an account of the state of Roman law and Hellenistic philosophy at the beginning of the period of interaction, for which the Roman embassy of the Athenian philosophers in 155 BCE offers a convenient starting point. In the 2nd century BCE the inegalitarian and expert-guided manner of dispute resolution in Rome is secularised, with case law becoming its main product. In philosophy the most important schools that attract the attention of the Romans are the dogmatic Stoics and their sceptical adversaries, the Academics.

This chapter deals again with the influence of law on philosophy, now with regard to a substantive issue. Under the influence of the Roman jurists, for whom private property was an important topic, the ‘Roman’ Stoics followed suit, and awarded private property a novel, central place in thinking about justice, a place which would have a decisive influence on modern, Western political thought.

This chapter rounds off the volume in two ways. It deals with, first, the more sporadic interaction between jurists and philosophers in the early imperial period, and second, with the influence of the late Republican interaction on law and philosophy as they are both practised today.

In this chapter, the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law is discussed in terms of method: with the help of the Stoic dialectical methods of classifying and defining the Roman jurists could start to systematise the organically grown output of their civil law and turn the resolution of disputes into a scientific enterprise, producing systematic overviews along the way. In the 6th century CE, the Roman Emperor Justinian took the influential decision that an updated version of one of these accounts itself be given the status of law.

Whereas the previous chapters dealt with the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law in terms of method, this chapter deals with the influence with regard to a substantive issue, the notion of person. The Roman jurists became interested in the abstract use of the notion of person in the slipstream of the philosophers, who combined the Greek understanding of person with a more indigenous, that is Etruscan, understanding thereof. ‘Person’ thus understood would become one of the central notions in Roman law and beyond.

In this chapter the topic of the interaction between Roman law and Hellenistic philosophy in the late Republican era is introduced, with reference to earlier treatments in modern scholarship. Furthermore, preliminary issues are brought up, such as the problem of the sources, the characterisations of law and philosophy as practices – law as a practice of dispute resolution and philosophy as practiced within schools or haereseis with different outlooks -, and the role of rhetoric in the interaction.

In this chapter the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law is continued in terms of method: from Hellenistic epistemology the Roman jurists, like the grammarians, took over the notion of rule: they started to use it initially as a mnemotechnical device in order to get to grips with their growing legal output.

Whereas in the previous chapters the influence of law on philosophy is brought up, this chapter deals the influence of law on philosophy, with regard to method. Already within early Hellenistic philosophy a shift of focus can be discerned from a virtue-centered to an action-orientated approach: in the 3rd century BCE the early Stoics had become interested in questions about the ‘appropriate actions’ that can be derived from these virtues. In the 2nd century BCE, inspired by the Roman jurists, the Roman Stoics became interested in the concrete applications of such actions or – put differently – introduced casuistry into philosophy.