The ancient Roman tradition and the Polish idea of the senate in the Age of Enlightened Classicism, 1764-1831

Abstract

In 1859, Jozefat Ohryzko, a Polish jurist and editor of historical sources, harshly reviewed the second edition of The History of Slavic Jurisprudence, a monumental six-volume work written by the noted Slavist Wacław Aleksander Maciejowski which had been published nearly three decades earlier. The comparatively young reviewer had no qualms in indicating that his much older fellow scholar had made many mistakes in terms of his historical accuracy. The time-honoured treatise appeared to Ohryzko to be a monument to an obsolete perception of the past. In particular, he found Maciejowski’s argument about the existence of a strong affinity between the Polish and ancient Roman Senates especially inaccurate. As he put it: The Roman Senate was by no means a model for the Polish one (…). We had a senate, there are no doubts about it, but it was specific. It conformed to our national spirit, which gave rise to all our historical institutions. The Polish Senate cannot be compared with any other, especially its Roman namesake. In Rome and in our Slavic fatherland everything was different. The bricks used to build the Polish and Roman Senates (…) were made out of different kinds of clay.1