Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

The situation of the text of the Edict is roughly similar. On the one hand, there are not even limited inscribed records (just as we would expect for such general texts). On the other, the Edict is more systematically quoted by the jurists. One form in which they wrote was the commentary on major bodies of law. The centrality and compactness of the Edict made it an attractive framework for this, especially once it had been fixed by the emperor. Thus we can reverse-engineer much of the Edict with some confidence. Another important type of legal writing was the introduc tory textbook. Two of these survive more or less complete, both with the general title Institutiones (“Training,” a title used for education in other fields as well). The earlier of these appears to come from the mid second century ad and was written by a jurist known only by his first name, Gaius (rather like referring to a modern legal expert simply as “John”). We know essentially nothing about him personally. The work offers a systematic but reasonably accessible treatment of most of Roman private law; the areas he does not treat at all – notably what we might today call criminal, constitutional, and religious law – appear to have been similarly (if less dramatically) neglected by the rest of the profession. Gaius is more distinctive in giving, if only occasion ally, information about the law before his own time that could only have been of historical interest. We are lucky to have the work at all; it comes from a single manuscript that has some gaps and whose pages were reused to write other works on. The other textbook comes down to us under the name of the sixth-century emperor Justinian (see the later discussion of its

38