The Digest (Corpus Iuris Civilis)

This smaller and accessible edition of the Digesta Digests/Pandects largely represents the Florentine manuscript the authoritative 6th-century Greek-Latin manuscript of the Digest. Although it is established that this manuscript is also corrupt in places—due both to the errors of the compilers and the carelessness of subsequent scribes—in a work of this kind, which serves as a primary source of Roman law and is read primarily for the knowledge of its contents, one must guard against excessive confidence in emendation. Such confidence does not advise the reader of the received reading, but rather acts to obliterate it. One is deterred by the traces of those who today persist in these texts, by receiving into the order of words what are sometimes merely probable (though uncertain), sometimes merely what pleases them, and not rarely, perverse inventions. In this way, they often deceive students, and not students alone. For this reason, I have very rarely departed from the received text, nor have I easily done so in more serious matters, unless clear testimonies—especially Greek ones—recommended an amendment beyond the mere probability of the reading. Whenever this edition follows neither the first nor the second reading of the Florentine manuscript, the received reading is noted in the footnotes for all amendments, even those of the smallest moment, except for those that are purely orthographic. Judgment regarding the corrector of the Florentine manuscript should be sought from my larger edition, where I have demonstrated that he is very often either deceived or deceiving: nevertheless, I have generally given place in the notes of this edition to his corrections or interpolations, since even if some are very poor, legal scholars must diligently take them into account. Furthermore, I have added to the notes my own emendations or those of others that I approve, generally as they were proposed in the larger edition, with a few later suppressed, added, or changed. For a great part of legal scholarship also resides in discovering and removing the corruptions of the Digesta, although in many places, when one must despair of recovering the original words, every emendation consists of attempting to reach the disturbed meaning through conjecture. I have announced the names of the learned men whose emendations I have approved, as was proper: corrections offered without a name are my own, except for those that are common and have been handed down for centuries, whose author one would neither easily seek nor require. But since it is often established, especially from the agreement of the Greeks and the Florentine book, that the received reading, although corrupt, was nonetheless written in that way in the very archetype of the Justinianic Digesta, the methods of this edition did not seem to permit distinguishing such older corruptions from the errors of later scribes. The Greek books that contribute to the emendation of the Digesta, as well as those few things that could be accepted and approved from second-rate codices, are either read in this edition in the order of words or are proposed in the notes among the other probable emendations with their authority inscribed. The comparison of the Basilica a 9th-century Greek legal code itself and the citation of the Bolognese readings seemed to exceed the scope of this edition, and it appeared that these would not so much be useful as they would be a hindrance. For it is agreed today among everyone that a critical apparatus such as the Gebauerian one, and the Kriegelian one derived from it, is equally useless to philologists and students of law. For neither gained anything from the disagreements with the Florentine reading recorded there from the scribes of the 13th century and especially from the editors of the 15th and 16th centuries, which often return to trifles as empty and tiresome as they are neither recommended nor excused by the authority of any witnesses. Scholars, I think, will approve that the margin has been relieved of these, and space has been given to those things which, regardless of what they are, can certainly be weighed with some profit.

If any items received in the Digesta return elsewhere (either in the works of legal authors that still exist, or in other compilations, or in the Digesta themselves in another place) or are at least cited with the name of the author added, it seemed useful to refer the reader to such places. I have also added to the individual titles of the four parts, into which it is agreed the compilers of the Pandectae All-receiving (another name for the Digest) distributed the books of the wise, an indication of the Sabiniana related to the commentary on the Edict by Sabinus, Edictalis related to the Edict of the Praetor, Papinianae related to the writings of Papinian, and the Appendix, so that the method by which individual titles were composed might be evident from that. Likewise, for individual titles, I have cited the titles of the Basilica that correspond, and the titles of the Institutiones and the Codex that possess a certainly similar inscription. Finally, I have added the Greek version, neither the barbaric version of the 12th century, of which I provided a sample in the larger edition, nor the common version contaminated by that barbaric one and by the corrections of later men, but the version that I approved.

Berlin, June 20, 1868: and March 24, 1872.