Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

22. Conclusion EEE

I began this book with one Roman’s mixed feelings about the law. For him, Roman law was both one of the great and distinctive accomplishments of human civilization and a some what trivial game played by geeks for (at best) their own enter tainment or (at worst) the legitimization of all kinds of mischief and even theft. The contexts in which Cicero was speaking suggest that both of his prejudices were widely held, at least in the elite circles in which he moved. He doesn’t, that is, tell us about all Romans. In a sense, moreover, the texts I quoted there are largely theoretical. That is, one of them is entirely detached from any individual transaction or legal proceeding, and the other comes up only incidentally in the course of a trial on an unrelated matter. I want to conclude the book by briefly looking at the possibility of a similarly divided opinion of the law at more ordinary levels of society and in the heat of actual legal business. The text I use to raise these questions for the sake of argu ment is a fairly simple contract, somewhat remarkably pre served, from the Netherlands ( [25] ). The underlying transaction is clear enough; one Stellus Reperius Boesus has sold a cow for

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