D. 9,2,51 and the Role of Dialectic in Julian’s Interpretation of Chapter One Lex Aquilia

Abstract

D. 9,2,51 Iul. 86 dig. is one of the best known texts in Justinian’s Digest, appearing near to the end of title 9,2 on the lex Aquilia concerning damage to property. In it, the jurist Julian poses a hypothetical case in which two assailants each mortally wound a slave in separate incidents, culminating in the slave’s death. The question arises concerning the attackers’ liability under chapter one of the lex Aquilia for wrongful killing (“occidere”). Julian’s ruling is that both should be liable to the direct statutory action. At the end of the text, he goes on to state that many solutions have been accepted by the civil law, contrary to dialectical argumentation (“contra rationem disputandi”) for the common good (“pro utilitate communi”). This contribution situates Julian’s approach to this problem in the context of Hellenistic philosophy, especially the branch of philosophy called dialectic that covered the field of formal logic and contained within it specific problems concerning the truth value of statements. My general thesis is that the positions taken by Julian in D. 9,2,51 and related texts are internally consistent if understood through the lens of dialectic, particularly the ancient theories concerning the truth value of statements.