Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

unlike their eventual descendent, the TV sit-com). It was not uncommon for characters in these plays to comment on legali ties or at least to use legal language. Also, the surviving com edies happen to come from a period (late third and early second century bc) for which we have very little other evidence. For the historian, this kind of text presents an obvious problem. A joke doesn’t need to get the law exactly right to be funny. It is not, for instance, really illegal for the owner to remove the tag from his or her mattress, as many comedians suggest. Still, at the very least, comedy can be used to date legal institutions that we understand better from other sources. For instance, a law against “going around with a weapon” that would other wise be dated to the first century bc can be placed at least a century earlier because a character quotes a phrase from it. My last and probably most important category is of a somewhat different sort. It includes the various writings of the politician, orator, and legal hobbyist Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc). Cicero was a practicing courtroom advocate, and after courtroom successes he often published the speeches he had given at trial. Though probably edited somewhat for publication and preserved for us by generations of copying, these come close to being documentary sources. They share the advantages and disadvantages of that kind of evidence. On the one hand, they are biased (he’s trying to win) and incomplete (he’s arguing one case, not teaching a class), and in general it is hard to tell how representative any particular item is. On the other, they have some of the same claims to “reality” that more humble documents have. Beyond the speeches, however,

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