Schanbacher, Dietmar: Die Tripertita des Sextus Aelius

‘The Tripertita by Sextus Aelius. Thoughts about their Reconstruction‘: The Tripertita by Sextus Aelius, a commentary on the Twelve Tables, written around 198 BC, marked a turning point in the history of Roman Law. According to Pomponius this work contained ¿the cradle of the law¿. The scanty texts which are regarded today to be fragments of the Tripertita, do not come close to justifying this assessment. The most peculiar part is Part two of the Tripertita, interpretatio. In this section the implicit interpretatio of former days is explicated. Certainly familiar with the doctrine of the external and internal speech by his contemporary Diogenes from Babylon, Sextus Aelius persued the path taken by the former lawyers, from the external speech ot the Twelve Tables to their internal speech, in order to go the other way round, from the internal speech which the former lawyers had approached, to the external speech of the interpretatio. Thus Sextus Aelius appears to be an early, if not the first, phenomenologist of interpretation.