Anthologies and Epitomes in the West: Doctrine and Legislation

In the early years of the sixth century some notice crops up of bar­barian kings ambitious to link their names not only to the usual mili­tary victories but also to the important act of the promulgation of a “law.” There were few if any jurists to put the royal designs into ac­tion, so the personnel available did the best they could.

According to that remote point of view, this lex was the Roman law of the Visigoths—the Lex Romana Visigothorum-, nonetheless it was an odd “lex” from our point of view fifteen centuries later. For one thing, without concealing anything of its original physiognomy or its character as a private anthology, it was made up of snatches of the Sententiae of Paul and fragments of the Libri responsorum of Papi- nian, mixed in with a few imperial constitutions, either from before the Theodosian Code (and, on occasion, included in that Code) or after it. For another, it included a summary of all the Institutiones of Gaius—the Epitome Gai. Finally, the “legislative” texts (with the ex­ception of the summary of Gaius), were supplemented by explanatory annotations—additions interpreting the various provisions (and in­deed called interpretationes')—that we would now consider statements of doctrine rather than laws.

In short, examination of this document shows the limited idea that a king might have had of his own “law,” even in a kingdom as exten­sive and important as the Visigothic. It was an idea extremely remote from our own.

The situation was no different in other lands of Western Europe, where norms were always stitched together in this fashion. Nor was there any difference between the way a “legislative” text such as the Lex Romana Visigothorum was put together and other anthologies that remained in the state of private compilations such as the Lex Ro­mana Burgundionum, the so-called Lex Romana Raethica Curiensis, the Epitome Sancti Galli, the so-called Edictum Theoderiei, the Epitome fuldensis, and others. In many cases it is difficult to establish whether the manuscript in question conveys a lex or whether it incorporates and documents the work of a private individual. One example of a puzzle of this sort is the Epitome Sancti Galli, also given as Lex Ro­mana Curiensis.

Thus if there were “jurists” in Western Europe, they were capable of little more than knowing how to read, comprehending what they read as best they could. They did not bother to weed out what they did not understand; nor did they take the trouble to reflect on the materials they handled or to wonder whether an anthology could be­come “law.” Nor could they have thought that their contemporaries would hold their labors in very high esteem since they were well aware that most people were ignorant and illiterate, tormented by hunger and cold, and decimated by violence and epidemics.

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