Archive of the Sulpicii, Digest, and Codex
In this book, the evolution of the Roman law of real security, well-known through the legal sources (in particular Justinian’s Digest and Codex), will be reconstructed, while matching it with actual banking practices, in particular the secured lending transactions documented in the archive of the Sulpicii (TPSulp).
From the Digest and the Codex the legal framework of the law of real security can be reconstructed. The problem is that we do not always know exactly to what extent the law in the books accurately reflects the law in action. ‘The writings of the jurists and imperial constitutions in general show us legal practice only through the lens of juristic abstraction and reflection.’[11] [12] [13] [14] [15] It is true that court rooms are the ultimate testing grounds for the validity of legal transactions, but only a few of them reach these grounds. By focusing on actual transactions one gets a better view of how legal institutions were used by participants in the Roman economy in everyday situations. Ultimately, documents reflecting actual transactions provide the real basis for identifying the economic and social conditions of private law institutions and their functioning in practice.12The documents of the Sulpicii archive give us a much more detailed picture of the economic and social setting of legal transactions than the Digest or the Codex. Although in contrast with the ‘law of the emperors’ and the ‘law of the jurists’ contained in the Codex and the Digest they are not formal sources of law, they do demonstrate how these normative sources were actually applied in practice. This collection of documents provides a unique and fascinating insight into the daily practice of a family of financiers (the Sulpicii) active in the Roman empire of the first century ad.b The tablets included in the Sulpicii archive demonstrate that Roman law was not a purely intellectual construct of members of the elite, but rather that the Roman legal system—in all its complexity—was actually applied in financial and commercial practice, even by relatively small bankers such as the Sulpicii.14 The archive of the Sulpicii not only provides us with specific examples of transaction documents—loans, guarantees, pledges, auction announcements—they also enable us to reconstruct how various legal institutions (e.g., mutuum, stipulatio, pignus, and fideiussio) were linked to each other in practice. The archive even contains ‘client files’, consisting of legal documents which allow us to follow a clientbank relationship over a period of several years?5 More generally, the documents in the archive are connected, in the sense that they were part of the same business operation.
The fact that the environment of the Sulpicii archive was Campania and not Rome does not detract from its significance for Roman law at all. It is beyond doubt that the documents of the Sulpicii archive are representative of a much wider area (including Rome itself).[16] [17] [18] The form (tabulae ceratae, diptychs/triptychs), style (chirographs, testationes), and content (e.g., mutuum cum stipulatione) of these documents, are found not only in the other Campanian (Pompeii, Herculaneum) tablets but also in writing tablets from Dacia, Frisia, and in the recently published writing tablets from Roman London?7
More on the topic Archive of the Sulpicii, Digest, and Codex:
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- THE MURECINE ARCHIVE AS A WINDOW IN IURE
- TAPIA'S BANQUET HALL AND OTHER ‘FICTITIOUS' SALES IN THE ARCHIVE OF KAKO AND PATERMOUTHIS
- The recovery of the Digest
- THE REDISCOVERY OF THE DIGEST
- The Digest
- The Digest or Pandects
- LEGAL SCIENCE AND RHETORIC IN JUSTINIAN'S DIGEST
- Digest Lemon and Lotus Flower
- The German “modern use” of the Digest
- The Digest
- The Digest or Pandects
- 1. The essential data provided in the Digest