ROMANS AND ROMAN LAW

Today the ancient Romans are probably best known for the dramatic and bloody parts of their world (say, gladiators and legions) or for the quaint details (think aristocrats wearing togas and carried in sedan chairs). But if we ask what their most important or most lasting mark on the world was, the answer would almost certainly be their legal system. Of course, many other ancient societies had legal codes, some long before the Romans'. A famous inscription now housed in Paris gives us the Code of Hammurabi, a set of nearly 300 legal rules from eighteenth-century b.c. Babylon. The five Old Testament books of the Torah offer us much Jewish law from rather later. The other great “classical” civilization, that of Greek Athens, has left us a substantial legacy of courtroom oratory. Yet over the course of centuries, the Romans developed something genuinely different. Their legal system was vastly larger, more encompassing, more systematic, and more general than anything else that existed at the time. Moreover (and through different routes) it returned to life even after the fall of the Roman Empire.