Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

use such written statements; after all, a defendant’s hometown could not literally appear on the stand to attest to his good character, but the city council could approve a written state ment. What is perhaps surprising, then, is that we know of many cases in which witnesses who were physically present and testifying also provided testationes . Some of these cases may technically involve a distinction between live testimony by individuals and a written testatio from an organization to which they belonged, but this is not always the case. This sug gests that the mere fact of documentary form may have lent extra credibility to what could otherwise have been expressed orally. Similarly, the actual practice of making stipulatio contracts may show that the public was more convinced than the legal system of the value of writing agreements down. This kind of contract had, as we have noted, a required oral component, but it seems to have had no written one. It is striking, then, that so many of the written legal instruments we have are in fact stipu lations [1, 2, 4, 8–10, 12] . In fact, it has even been claimed that the contract actually did have an obligatory written component not mentioned by any legal sources. This seems unlikely, but it does point out the seeming mismatch of our evidence for the ory and practice. However, a better explanation might be along the lines just suggested for testationes . Real individuals without (or despite) professional legal knowledge of the irrelevance of writing seem to have felt that it conveyed extra certainty to the proceedings. This may have been for more or less practi cal reasons; documents have a clearer and impartial memory. It

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