Il nomos tra divinità e umanità dell’ordine. Dalle Institutiones di Marciano alla Weltanschauung greca

The paper investigates the relationship between divinity and humanity in law through Roman legal sources of the Severan age and the texts of the archaic and classical Greek tradition. Starting from Papinian’s Latin definition of lex and from the Greek definition of nomos which Marcian takes from Demosthe- nes, Against Aristogeiton I XXV.16, further enriched by an implicit reference to Pindar, the essay shows how Roman jurists reinterpreted Greek categories within the framework of imperial power. On the Greek side, the analysis of Hesiod, Solon, Heraclitus, Pindar, and Demosthenes highlights the grow- ing tension between divine order, natu- ral order, and positive law: a complex dialectic emerges, in which nomos os- cillates between divine gift, human in- vention, and universal political princi- ple, capable of grounding and legiti- mising both justice and the use of force.