Definition
In civil law, an elogium is a will or testament — the formal written instrument by which a person directs the disposition of their property upon death. The term appears in the Roman civil law tradition and entered legal vocabulary through the Justinianic codes.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A eulogy; a speech or writing in praise of a person, typically delivered at a funeral or memorial.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A brief writing; an inscription; especially, an inscription on a tomb or monument; also, a panegyric or commendatory notice.
The gap here is instructive and unusual. In ordinary English, elogium (or its anglicized form eulogy) refers to praise of a person, often at their death. In civil law, it refers to the legal instrument governing what happens to their estate at death. The two meanings share a funerary context but are otherwise entirely distinct — one commemorates, the other commands. A researcher encountering elogium in a civil law source and reading it as "eulogy" will misread the document entirely.
Common Confusion
ELOGIUM should not be confused with ELOGIUM in its classical rhetorical sense (a praise inscription or epitaph), which appears in historical and ecclesiastical texts unrelated to testamentary law. In legal sources, elogium is strictly a civil law term for a testamentary instrument. It is also distinct from ELOIGN (or eloin, eloine), a separate legal term meaning to remove or convey property or persons beyond the reach of legal process — Burrill's entry for elogium appears immediately adjacent to the eloign entry, and the proximity in some sources creates a risk of conflation for researchers scanning rather than reading.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is nearly extinct in modern legal usage. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in civil law treatises, glossaries derived from Roman or continental sources, and early English works that imported civilian vocabulary. Its presence in a document signals a civil law (as opposed to common law) analytical frame for testamentary questions.
The Burrill entry is the most useful of the three sources because it supplies a Codex reference (Cod. 6.23.29–30; Cod. 6.51.2), grounding the term in the Corpus Juris Civilis. Researchers tracing the concept through primary sources should follow those Codex citations rather than relying on the thin definitions in Black's alone.
The adjacency of eloign in Burrill's entry warrants attention. Burrill begins his elogium entry, supplies the civil law definition, then immediately pivots to eloign without a clean break. This is a typographical and organizational artifact of the 19th-century dictionary format. A researcher working from a partial transcription or image scan of Burrill should be alert to the possibility that elogium and eloign material has been merged or run together in reproduction.
Because elogium maps onto the broader concept of testamentum in Roman law, researchers exploring the history of wills and succession in civil law jurisdictions will find the term useful as a search hook in Latin-language primary sources, but it carries no independent doctrinal weight beyond identifying the instrument as testamentary in character.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the definition without variation: elogium means a will or testament in the civil law. None of the three entries elaborate on the term's relationship to specific formal requirements of the civil law will, distinctions between types of testamentary instruments (nuncupative vs. written), or the stages of Roman testamentary evolution. Burrill is marginally more useful for providing Codex citations that allow verification in primary sources. Black's (both editions) offers only the bare definition. None of the historical sources address how elogium might appear in English legal writing that imported civilian vocabulary — a gap researchers should account for when the term surfaces in Anglo-American treatises on ecclesiastical or maritime law, both of which historically drew on civilian doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Elogium as a live legal term has no modern jurisdictional home in U.S. or English law. It retains relevance in research touching civil law systems — particularly those derived from Roman law — and in the historical law of jurisdictions where ecclesiastical courts exercised testamentary jurisdiction under civilian influence.