Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Sources for Roman Law

know the contents of the will of a man usually called Dasumius (d. ad 108) because he made provisions for it to be inscribed on stone and made public. (This was apparently part of a more general goal of memorialization after death.) However, the pro cess was expensive and time-consuming, so inscriptions were usually reserved for things like laws and treaties instead of day-to-day legal documents. The other reason for preservation is that peculiar local conditions sometimes happened to pro mote the survival of more common, but normally more per ishable, writing surfaces: papyrus, parchment (both essentially forms of paper), and wax tablets. The most important example of this is the way the dryness of the Egyptian desert has pre served thousands of documents (legal and nonlegal) written on papyrus. Because the survival of documentary sources depends so much on random circumstance, the information we get from them is potentially distorted. For instance, documents from anywhere in Egypt may be unrepresentative because we know that that area had an unusual legal system, combining elements of Roman, Greek, and native Egyptian law (see Chapter 21). Or consider the records recovered from the area around Pompeii and Herculaneum in central Italy that was buried by the erup tion of Vesuvius in ad 79. On the one hand, both legal scholars and archaeologists benefit from having a “snapshot” of these cit ies at a particular moment in time. On the other, the surviving records may be idiosyncratic. We have several hundred docu ments, but they are nearly all from only two archives (in and near Pompeii) and a third cluster of records (at Herculaneum).

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