Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

first to arise were the various writings of the jurists (Chapter 5). The crucial transition seems to have been from the giving of oral answers in consultation ( responsa ) to the collection and publi cation of these responses. This is first attested around 200 bc, though it may have begun earlier. From there it was relatively easy to move to commentaries and treatises with more abstract structure. Surviving juristic writing often cites other jurists, even across large swaths of time, indicating the fundamentally writing-based nature of their project. Written from the begin ning, moreover, was the form of Imperial legislation known as the “rescript.” This took the form of an emperor’s response to a petition (itself a written text), written at the end of the original petition document itself and returned. Some of these will have been of interest only to the parties immediately concerned, but others became precedents of great generality. Much of Roman government operated on this petition-and-response model, so many rescripts are not sources of law in a straightforward sense. Still, the rescript was the standard mechanism for deal ing with judicial appeals to the emperor, and so it became an important (and necessarily written) source of law. It is worth noting how closely the rescript is tied to the actual physical petition. Nothing about the process requires the existence of more than a copy for the petitioner (and, gener ally, one in the imperial files). In some cases, interested parties would post the text of rescripts in more lasting materials. In others, the texts made their way into the juristic tradition and so could be copied repeatedly in manuscript. Both cases illus trate a more general point about the use of writing in making

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