INTRODUCTION

From the mid-fifth century BC, if not earlier, when law was first set out in writing, the Romans were interested in the creation of systems. The act of writing down the law that became known as the “Twelve Tables” in c 450 BC was the result of a process of selection and arrangement, carried out, according to later tradition, by Boards of Ten, whose rule degenerated into tyranny.

Archaic in language and increasingly obscure in meaning, the Twelve Tables remained a point of legal reference throughout antiquity, for some thousand years.^{[169] [170] Jurists, such as Servius, struggled with the etymology of the decemvirs' legal terminology,[171] and the exact distinction between, for example, “manifest” and “non-manifest” theft was vigorously debated.[172] But what was obscure to classical jurists may have been clear enough in practice to satisfy the requirements of a small, agriculturally-based community in the fifth century BC. That the terms of debate - manifest/non-manifest forms of theft, or the capacity of rainwater (aqua pluviae) to do harm - proved remarkably tenacious in juristic legal analysis[173] is a demonstration of the power of the legal tradition and the ability of jurists to sustain a technical discourse in its own terms over many centuries. Whether this established “legal isolationism” beyond dispute is another question.}

Roman legal history is framed by two codifications, the Twelve Tables, which limited its contents to initially ten and then twelve tablets, and the Corpus luris Civilis of Justinian, the compilers of which in 530 AD were confronted by a mass of material set out in (by their count) two thousand books, containing three million lines⁶ accumulated “since the days of Romulus”.⁷ Justinian, the product (and overlord) of a sophisticated bureaucratic and legal culture devel­oped over many centuries, cited precedents, assumed a high level of literacy on the part of both the compilers and the users of his codes, and explicitly asserted an agenda to promote legal education and the improved access to legal material, which would assist court practice.

It should not surprise that two law codes nearly a thousand years apart should diverge in aims, length, content and even material form. But are the words “law code” as applied to the Corpus luris Civilis correct? Strictly speaking, only the Codex Justinianus was a “code”: the Institutes were a textbook of first principles, and the Digest, or Pandecta, an encyclopaedia. Fergus Millar has commented that “in no real sense was the Digest a code of law; on the contrary, it is a collection of varying opinions on points of law.”⁸ So it is worth asking what, in ancient terms, was a law code in a “real sense”. Who had the right to create them? Did they require some form of “official” input or endorsement? What was the status of “interpretation”, when codified? And were their purposes and impact solely, or even primarily, “legal”?

B.