Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Sources for Roman Law

real authorship), and in many respects is simply an updated revision of Gaius’s work. Mention of Justinian leads us to the most important techni cal source (or set of sources): the so-called Corpus Iuris Civilis (literally the “body of the civil law”). This was a set of four legal works prepared in the 530s ad at the direction of the Byzantine (i.e., Eastern Roman) emperor Justinian. The revised Institutiones were one of its components, and two of the others are relatively unimportant for our purposes. The fourth com ponent, however, is far and away our most important single source for Roman law. It is called the Digest , and it is (as the name suggests) a compilation work. Justinian’s chief lawyer, Tribonian, and a committee sorted through the texts of cen turies of juristic writings, gathering together the relevant pas sages on various topics, and selecting and (sometimes) editing them to give up-to-date information. The idea was that this officially approved collection would then replace the original juristic texts and even the statutory law and edictal material they quoted and discussed. This project is helpful to the modern historian in that it was designed to be broad and systematic. It has also proven handy that Tribonian and his team worked as quickly as they did; apparently it took them only about three years to process thousands of “books” of raw material. This was reduced to fifty books (each the length of a long modern chapter and divided into subsections called “titles”). They did not have time to smooth out differences between individual jurists or even between whole periods of law nearly as much as their mission would have suggested. Instead of a smooth,

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