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INTRODUCTION

Soon a violent wind, called the northeaster, rushed down from Crete. Since the ship was caught and could not be turned head-on into the wind, we gave way to it and were driven. By running under the lee of a small island called Cauda [or Clauda] we were scarcely able to get the ship's boat under control.

After hoisting it they took measures to undergird the ship; then fearing that they would run on the Syrtis they lowered the sea anchor and so were driven. We were being pounded by the storm so violently that on the next day they began to throw the cargo overboard and on the third day with their own hands they threw the ship's tackle overboard. When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest raged, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.1

The apostle Paul's journey from Caesarea to Rome did not stop with that. Drifting at sea for two weeks, the travellers, all 276 of them, ended up swimming to shore on the island of Malta after part of the crew had tried to leave in smaller boats and the food had eventually been thrown overboard in a last effort to rescue the ship from final destruction as it was run aground. If the description of Paul's shipwreck is remarkable in its detail, the event it covers must have been rather banal throughout history. There was a lot of shipping carried out in Antiquity, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and in the last fifty years underwater archaeology has been steadily confirming what was already known through the literary sources: shipwreck (naufragium) was a fact of life, so much so that ancient laws could not escape taking it into account, developing legal arrangements regarding the conse­quences in the law of obligations (for both contracts and delicts) and the law of property. Roman law was no exception, as such titles as D 14.2 (De lege [284] Rhodia de iactu) or D 47.9 (De incendio ruina naufragio rate nave expug­nata) of Justinian's Digest indicate.2 Obviously, the compilers did not think it relevant to group together all aspects of Roman maritime law - or commer­cial law in general - when they had a unique chance of doing so: �Roman commercial law' is a modern concept, not an ancient one.3

Because of the universal nature of legalproblems connected with shipwreck, the solutions proposed in classical Antiquity had a tremendous impact on the subsequent legal history of maritime law, to the effect that many commenta­tors have discussed the various, though relatively few, Greek and Latin texts dealing with these issues.4 The purpose of this chapter is to look, once again, at Title 14.2 of Justinian's Digest, although this is not the place to discuss the inspiring insights and puzzling errors of previous scholars, as the task has been done recently and - in my view - satisfactorily by Nathan Badoud, a graduate student at the universities of Neuchatel and Bordeaux III, in his 2004 unpublished Master's (DEA) thesis on the topic.5 Instead, the discus­sion will focus here on the diversity of the contents of the title, on its place within the Digest as a whole, and on its overall organisation, in order to look at some larger issues of Roman commercial law, and its relation to known economic and social realities of the ancient world.

B.

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Source: Cairns J.W., Plessis P.J. du. (eds.). Beyond Dogmatics: Law and Society in the Roman World. Edinburgh University Press,2007. - 236 p.. 2007

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