Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

That is, we have the business records (which are presumably not complete) of only a few people among the tens of thousands who lived in the area at the time of the eruption, to say nothing of the tens of millions who lived under Roman law at one time or another. There are a few similar caches from other times and places (most notably one found in modern-day Transylvania), but the essential problem remains. Because we have so little hard evidence, it is hard to tell whether any given piece of it is “normal” or, if so, how far we can generalize it in time or space. Still, the documentary evidence has the advantage of being real. We need not worry about problems like interpola tion or the danger that our reference sources, even if we know what they mean to say, are too theoretical. Arguably, the law that governs day-to-day life is the most important law, even if it is not officially “correct.” Hence many of the example texts will be drawn from documentary sources, and especially from the principal Pompeian archive.

Nontechnical Sources

The “nontechnical” sources are a very mixed bag, including virtually everything else that gives us some information about the law. Given what survives from ancient Rome, that generally means literary texts. Almost anything can make reference to the law, but a few categories are of special importance. The first of these is antiquarian writing. By the time we start to have a good quantity of surviving texts (the first century

42