Reading Roman Manumission Legislations: the Leges Fufia Caninia et Aetia Sentia in Gaius

All interested graduate students please  join us for this semester’s edition of Program in the Ancient World Workshop and Papers!

One of the greatest challenges of studying Roman law is the state of preservation of source material.  The challenge is even greater in the case of Republican and early imperial legislations.  For in most cases we do not have the original legislative texts and what we do have comes from much later secondary and tertiary sources.  Even these later sources themselves can be deceptively difficult to navigate.  Take for example the Institutes by the second-century CE jurist Gaius, one of our most important sources on Roman law.  It is easy to forget that the Institutes was a textbook or rather a collection of lecture notes meant for aspiring law students, not a law code like the Digest, much less a transcript of legislative texts.  This sometimes results in erroneous understanding of specific legislations.  To illustrate some of these interpretive difficulties we will look at what Gaius says and equally important what he does not say about the Lex Fufia Caninia of 4 BCE and the Lex Aelia Sentia of 2 CE, two of the legislative pillars of Augustus’ manumission reform.