Translations and commentaries: Massimo Brutti, Valerio Marotta, Fara Nasti and Emanuele Stolfi

Introduction: Aldo Schiavone

With its rules and procedures, Roman law represents one of the great legacies of the ancient world. This anthology offers for the first time to a wide audience important examples of the writing and intellectual legacy of ancient jurists.
This volume collects writings, significant in style and thought, by ten jurists active between the 1st century BCE. and the 3rd century CE, reinserted in their original contexts and soberly commented, to allow the reader to closely follow the genesis and development of a knowledge without which we would not be what we are today; an extraordinary sequence of opinions and interpretations that gave birth to the first entirely formal law in human history, at the basis of the political and legal laboratory of modernity.

From Aldo Schiavone’s Introduction:
«In spite of the centrality of their role, the Roman jurists, the founders of the legal reasoning of the West - the true protagonists of an unparalleled intellectual experience, which took place for centuries within the framework of a world empire, to the maintenance of which they made a decisive contribution - have completely disappeared from our modern gaze. Indeed, in our shared culture is as if they never even existed: their ideal profile, their political positioning, their way of thinking about law, the power relations built around each of them, the salient features of their biographies – they are all swallowed up by darkness.
Even their names are nearly lost to oblivion. We all know of Silas, of Cicero, of Seneca, not to mention Virgil or Horace; and even of Spartacus or Catiline. And yet who – even among educated people – can say of Antistio Labeone, of Salvius Julianus, of Juvencius Celsus or Julius Paulus? Even if we owe to them, and to a few dozen other similar figures, the fact that today, almost all over the planet, from Paris to Los Angeles, from Helsinki to Sydney, and by now even Shanghai, we think of the form of law - its rules, its procedures, however changeable and debatable they may be in different countries - as an invisible but very tenacious weave that envelops and determines much of our existence.»