This new issue of the Mainz Academy corpus of Roman legal sources on slavery is the sixth volume (out of thirty-six) to be published since the original project was launched in 1999. Its subject matter is the different legal mechanisms through which someone could claim redress and compensation against third parties who had killed, maimed, stolen or corrupted a slave. It contains 362 excerpts from ancient legal sources (Rechtsquellen) prefaced by a 24-page introduction.
The introduction focuses on four pieces of legislation: (a) the lex Aquilia, a plebiscite on the unlawful killing or maiming of someone else's slave; (b) the actio servi corrupti, a praetorian edict concerning the incitement of someone else's slave to commit unlawful acts; (c) the actio furti and similar actions on the theft or kidnapping of slaves; and (d) the actio iniuriarum, which covered physical and verbal attacks against a slave.
Each legal mechanism is described from four different angles. First the editors discuss who, apart from slave owners, was entitled to bring an action against third parties. Then they list the grounds upon which actions could be brought, followed by a description of the contents of each piece of legislation and what type of redress or compensation could be expected by the wronged party. Lastly they describe which other legal mechanisms could be used in combination with these civil actions.
Public criminal procedures, such as the lex Cornelia de sicariis which punished the murder or the castration of a slave, are barely touched upon, and only in so far as they could be used as alternatives to the aforementioned mechanisms of redress.
In its search for clarity, the introductory essay sometimes glosses over the complexities of Roman law. Differences of opinion among Roman jurists are mentioned, but they are more often presented as different stages of the historical evolution of the law rather than as disagreements about the interpretation of the content and application of the law. More significantly, the introduction contains no references to modern scholarly debates. It seems that the editors were happy with a general description of the collected material, and that they had little interest in the associated controversies generated both in ancient and in modern times.
The collection of sources encompasses most of Roman legal history, from the Law of the XII Tables (c. 450 b.c.) to Justinian's Institutes (a.d. 533). As is to be expected, however, the bulk of the material comes from Justinian's Digest (269 texts).Footnote 1 The compilation of texts is thorough, although I noticed some omissions (e.g. D. 7.1.66.pr).
The Latin texts are accompanied by translations in German and a short commentary. As the translations privilege faithfulness over transparency, commentaries consist mostly of a restatement and expansion of the content of the original texts. Sometimes they provide some context and cross-references to related passages.
Slaves are so ubiquitous in Roman legal sources, that selecting the passages relevant to a given specific aspect of the legal edifice of Roman slavery can often be overwhelming and time-consuming. The legalese in which the extant documents were written can often be frustratingly abstruse. A selection of sources related specifically to slavery, ordered by subject matter, translated and interpreted, therefore, is to be welcomed. But if this corpus is to become an obligatory point of reference for the scholar and the student of Roman slavery, there is certainly room for improvement.
Like all volumes of the collection published so far, this compilation lacks any philological merit. The Latin texts are taken from the standard critical editions of Roman law sources, but without the apparatus criticus. (The editions used are: P. Krueger and T. Mommsen, Corpus Iuris Civilis [1895]; E. Schekel and B. Kuebler, Gai Institutiones [1935]; and S. Riccobono et al., Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani [FIRA] [1940–1943].) There are practically no indications of text emendations by the original editors or differences between manuscripts, let alone of possible interpolations (the only exception is D.11.3.1.3 [passage 122, p. 99], in which the editors adopt Mommsen's improvement of the text [Textverbesserung]). New revised critical editions of the sources were seemingly not used (a conspicuous example is the fragments from the Law of the XII Tables, ascribed to Table VIII rather than to Table I, as in M.H. Crawford [ed.], Roman Statutes [1996], II.555–6).
Similarly to the introduction, the commentaries on the sources do not fully engage with the complex discussions typical of the field of Roman law studies. Disagreements among modern scholars are dealt with briefly and superficially in footnotes (e.g. p. 26 n. 8; p. 78 n. 107; p. 163 n. 203) rather than in the main text. Moreover, more often than not, references to modern authors are simply used to give authoritative support to the positions adopted in the commentary. As Frier noted about the first two volumes of the collection, the substance of modern scholarly debate remains unexplained (B.C. Frier, BMCR 2000.09.04, whose criticism of the collection I mostly share).
The arrangement of the selected excerpts is also problematic. Apart from the two fragments from the Law of the XII Tables, texts are listed in the order in which they have been preserved in ancient compilations of legal sources. This method has at least two main disadvantages, especially for the untrained eye.
First, this system makes no distinctions between statutes, praetorial edicts, senatorial decrees, decisions of the emperors and jurisprudence, in spite of their very dissimilar nature. Thus, for example, the text of the first chapter of the lex Aquilia is not found until p. 49, where it is quoted in D.9.2.2.pr (Gaius) and listed together with other Digest excerpts which are not part of the statute, but rather later jurists’ interpretations of when and how that statute had to be enforced.
Second, the fact that the passages are not arranged thematically means that if one is interested in only one specific remit of the collected material, one has no choice but to peruse the whole compilation. In fact, it is not uncommon to find passages that are related to different civil actions mixed together. In the introduction, bracketed numbers embedded in the text indicate which excerpts correspond to the issues being discussed. However, not all the relevant passages are quoted (almost 20% are not). The index locorum does not help in this respect, and the general index only partially. As a result, this corpus is not much easier to use than the ancient compilations it draws upon.
It is not clear how specialists in Roman law would benefit from an edition of the sources with these flaws as, on the one hand, they will be better served by other critical editions and, on the other, they will not find here any new insights into these topics. Non-specialists interested in specific areas of Roman slave law may find this collection more helpful, as they will have most of what they need in self-contained volumes. Perhaps the commentaries may help them understand the meaning of ancient legal texts more easily. None the less, I cannot help thinking that a good introductory book to Roman slave law coupled with computer and online databases would cater for their needs much better.
