LABEO, Marcus Antistius(cir. 50 b,c.-18 a.d.), was the son of Pacuvius Antistius Labeo, a jurist of minor note, who caused himself to be slain after the defeat of his party at Philippi. A member of the plebeian nobility, and in easy circumstances, the younger Labeo entered early upon public life, and soon rose to the praetorship; but his undisguised antipathy to the new régime, and the somewhat brusque manner in which in the senate he occasionally gave expression to his republican sympathies—what Tacitus (Ann. iii. 75) calls his incorrupta libertas — proved an obstacle to his advancement, and his rival, Ateius Capito, who had unreservedly given in his adhesion to the ruling powers, was unfairly promoted by Augustus to the consulate, when, in ordinary course, the appointment should have fallen to Labeo; the result was that, smarting under the wrong that was done him, he declined to accept the office when it was offered to him in a subsequent year (Tac., Ann. iii. 75; Pompon, in fr. 47, Dig. i. 2). From this time he seems to have abandoned politics, and devoted his whole time to jurisprudence, with which his name is much more prominently connected. His training in the science had been derived principally from Trebatius Testa, although he had also diligently attended the public audiences of most of the more eminent lawyers of the later years of the republic. To a profound knowledge of the law as he had received it from them he added a wide general culture, devoting his attention specially to dialectics, philology (grammatica), and antiquities, as valuable aids in the exposition, expansion, and application of legal doctrine (Gell., xiii. 10). Capito, in a letter preserved by Gellius (xiii. 12), says of him “nihil haberet nisi quod justum sιnctumque esse in Romanis ...antiquitatibus legisset and this has sometimes been thought irreconcilable with the statement of Pomponius (fr. 47, Dig. i. 2) that in law he was an innovator. But the observations of Capito refer to what he calls Labeo’s absurd craze for freedom—his horror of anything out of the old current of constitutional practice (which had led him, as Capito relates, into the ridiculous extreme of indignantly resenting, as unauthorized, the courtesy of a tribune who had ordered an officer simply to summon him to answer to a complaint, instead of apprehending him). In his jurisprudential teaching and advising there was none of this dogged indisposition to deviate from the paths of his predecessors. It was the characteristic of his rival Capito to stand as much as possible within the old lines,—“in his, quae ei tradita fuerunt, perseverabat” (Pomp, in fr. 47, Dig. i. 2); that of Labeo was, with the aid of his dialectic, philology, and antiquities, to dissect a received doctrine so as to reach its innermost ratio, and from this to start afresh, and give the doctrine a more accurate expression and a variety of new developments. His success in this new method is attested by the position he took among his contemporaries, and the reputation in which he was held by his successors. Down to the time of Hadrian his was probably the name of greatest authority; and the fact that several of his works were abridged and annotated by later hands testifies to the estimation in which they were held by practitioners. While Capito is hardly ever referred to, the dicta of Labeo are of constant recurrence in the writings of the classical jurists, such as Gaius, Ulpian, and Paul; and no inconsiderable number of them were thought worthy of preservation in Justinian’s Digest. Labeo gets the credit of being the founder of the Proculian sect or school, while Capito is spoken of as the founder of the rival Sabinian one (Pomponius in fr. 47, Dig. i. 2). It is doubtful whether this statement is quite accurate. Labeo certainly taught in some way or other; for it is recorded of him that he devoted six months of the year to giving professional advice and instructing his pupils in Rome, while the other six he spent in literary work at his country seat. But the lecturing stationes of which Gellius speaks (xiii. 13) had not by that time been established, and it is probable that the real founders of the two scholae were Proculus and Sabinus, followers respectively of the methods of Labeo and Capito. Such conjunctions (in reference to peculiar doctrines of the schools), as “Proculus et Pegasus,” “Sabinus et Cassius,” are very frequent; but the name of Labeo or Capito in conjunction with another is of the rarest occurrence. There is not a single case in the texts in which the latter is credited with the introduction of a doctrine of the Sabinians, and only one or two in which Labeo is spoken of as the author of a doctrine of the other school.
Labeo’s most important literary work was the Libri Posteriorum, so called because published only after his death. So far as can be judged, they contained a systematic exposition of the common law in at least forty books, after the order of the commentaries of Q. Mucius Scaevola. They seem to have been epitomized by Javolenus, who was a leader of the Sabinian school; and numerous excerpts from them, some from the original, others from the epitome, are preserved in Justinian’s Digest., His Libri αd Edictum, frequently referred to by Ulpian and Paul, as well as by earlier waiters, embraced a commentary, not only on the edicts of the urban and peregrine praetors, but also on that of the curule aediles. His Probabilium (πιθανών) Lib. V1I1., a collection of definitions and axiomatic legal propositions, seem to have been one of his most characteristic productions; they were abridged and annotated by Paul, and occasionally criticized by him with some severity. Amongst the writings of Labeo which we know only by report were Commentarii de jure pontificio, Commentarii ad XII. Tabulas, Libri Epistolarum, and Libri Responsorum. See Van Eck, “De vita, moribus, et studiis Μ. Ant. Labeonis,” Franeker, 1692, in Oelrichs’s Thes. Nov., vol. i.; Mascovius, De Sectis Sabinianor. et Proculianor., 1728; Dirksen, “lieber die Schulen der Bom. Juristen,” in his Beiträge zur Kunde des Röm. Rechts, 1825; Pernice, Μ. Antistius Labeo,—Das Röm. Privatrecht im ersten Jahrhunderte der Kaiserzeit, 1st and 2d vols., 1873 and 1878.
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