Abstract

[Law, Literature and a wider understanding of ‘the possible’] In their tales of mankind’s experiences, the great works of literature help jurists to understand the basic profiles of the juridical dimension and its continuous transformations. This essay focuses on some high literary works in referring on a very long time. Through the Aeschylus’ tragedies and the Homeric epic, we can understand the slow rise of a new legal culture that surpasses the archaic one, dominated by the principle of vengeance. Machiavelli’s works show how the change of cultural paradigms leads also the change of political and legal orders. Such as we note the work by the jurist Gio-vanni Battista De Luca, from the 1600’s, for its focus on legal language and jurist as direct indicators of the evolution of the juridical order, to describe juridical culture in that era the contribution by Alessandro Manzoni is more important. High literature contributes to our understanding of the social dimension of juridical phenomena.