Introduction

Our knowledge of ancient Roman law is based primarily on frag­ments of legal literature from the first and second centuries AD and the first few decades of the third century.

This suspicion is strikingly contradicted by documents dealing with transactions and acts which were of legal significance, of which we now have a large number. I am not referring to the countless papyri from Roman Egypt: prior to the edict of Caracalla of AD 212 these were almost without exception created by and for foreigners (peregrini) and reflect the peculiarities of the traditional systems of land registration and execution ofjudgments in Egypt.² Epigraphic documents, whether on stone (such as the sale of fiscal land, the will of Lucius Dasumius, or rights of way and aqueduct) or on copper (such as documents of conveyance or establishing foundations, or military diplomas), also need separate discussion. This chapter is confined to wax tablets: this is the type of document that the Romans actually used.³ We can limit ourselves to the four most important collections, which are typical of the whole:

(i)     The first wax tablets were found in Romania between 1786 and 1855, in gold mines near the Transylvanian town of Verespatak (the ancient Alburnus maior, which lay north west of Apulum). Only a few of the 25 documents that were found in the mines at this time are complete; in most cases only parts are preserved.⁴ In 1840 Hans Ferdinand Massmann first succeeded in deciphering their cursive Latin script.⁵

(ii)    On 3 and 5 July 1875 some of the business papers of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus were found in his house in Pompeii - 127 extremely charred documents were found tightly packed in a locked wooden chest:⁶ these were receipts for sums the banker had paid out, with few exceptions in connection with auctions.

(iii)   The Tabulae Herculanenses introduced us to a wide range of legal transactions: between 1946 and 1961 they were edited by Giovianni Pugliese Carratelli with a commentary by Vincenzo Arangio-Ruiz;⁸ Giuseppe Camodeca is working on a new edition. Only parts of most of these tablets are preserved; the editors assign them to 102 different documents, but that number is clearly too high.⁹

(iv)   The most important find of Roman procedural and business documents took place in 1959 in Murecine, a southerly suburb of Pompeii which had hardly been explored; this occurred in the course of construction of the motorway from Pompeii to Salerno. The most striking features are the large number of documents, their unusually good state of preservation, and the variety of the transactions attested. They were first edited in nine instalments by Carlo Giordano¹⁰ and Francesco Sbordone¹¹ between 1967 and 1980, and were newly edited by Giuseppe Camodeca in 1999 in an exhaustive and clearly improved edition.¹² The first edition contained 148 docu­ments; Camodeca’s edition contains 127 documents as well as fragments of documents.

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