Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Sources for Roman Law

bc), the Roman state was already more than half a millennium old. The Romans, a people who put a lot of stock in “tradi tion,” were interested in their own history, even if they were not always well informed. Hence we have works like Marcus Terentius Varro’s Human and Divine Antiquities (mid first cen tury bc), which was (as the title suggests) entirely an investi gation into Roman traditions, and Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights (mid second century ad), in which he copies and comments on interesting things he has read, including legal matters. There are many problems associated with these antiquarian works. It is not always clear when an ancient story reflects a legal point at all, and it is often hard to tell whether our sources (and their sources, and theirs, and so on) have correctly understood what ever legal content there was. After all, these authors were lei sured gentlemen, not professional lawyers or historians. And, sadly, most of Varro’s work is in any case now lost. In a similar vein, we might look to “history” proper, that is, to works that tell of the past in continuous narratives rather than as collections of miscellaneous facts. The situation here is often even worse than with the antiquarians. In antiquity, history was a highly literary genre, greatly shaped by consid erations of style and “appropriateness,” written by amateurs. They did not necessarily know or even care about the law. So, to take a very simple example, our sources for celebrated crimi nal trials do not always even agree on what the defendant was charged with. It may seem surprising to us, but a better source for many things may come from Roman comedy (plays that were not

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