Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

unified legal code, we have a document that shows its origins in cut-and-paste. Moreover, the editors were very good about providing citations for the passages they quote, aiding in our reconstructions of who said what and when. The disadvantage of the project from a modern point of view is that the Digest rendered all the early material – statutory, edictal, and juris tic alike – purely historical. As a result, none of it survives in its original form. The other parts of the Corpus were slightly less efficient in eliminating their predecessors but still left little behind. The Corpus remained of sufficient importance for long enough that it was preserved by copying (first in religious set tings, later in the earliest European universities), just as the major literary works of antiquity were. In addition to the major works just discussed, we also get occasional nuggets of information from lesser and later techni cal works. Some later collections of imperial enactments have also survived, as well as late and summary juristic works.

Technical Sources (Documentary)

The documentary sources are the scraps of contracts, receipts, wills, arbiters’ decisions, property markers, and other docu ments that were once part of actual business transactions or legal proceedings and that have now survived as historical evi dence. Such documents can survive for two different reasons. In some cases, it is because they were written on particularly lasting materials such as stone or metal tablets. For instance, we

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