Curated playlist
Roman law
- Codex GregorianusThe Codex Gregorianus is a collection of imperial Roman laws assembled from more than a century and a half of imperial pronouncements, spanning from the 130s to the 290s AD. Somewhere around 291 to 294, a man named Gregorius gathered…
- Lex AquiliaThe Lex Aquilia was enacted at some point in the 3rd century BC, during the Roman Republic. It held that a person who wrongfully killed another's slave or herd animal owed compensation. The debt was not the victim's value at the moment of…
- Lex Fufia CaniniaThe Lex Fufia Caninia, passed in 2 BC under the first Roman emperor Augustus, did something no Roman master had ever faced before: it told them how many of their own slaves they were allowed to free. Not in life, but in death. A Roman of…
- Roman lawRoman law, born in the mid-fifth century BC with the carving of the Twelve Tables, would go on to shape legal thinking for more than two thousand years. The German legal theorist Rudolf von Jhering once wrote that ancient Rome had…
- Dignitas (Roman concept)Dignitas, a Latin word from ancient Rome, had no clean translation in English. Not dignity alone, not prestige, not charisma. It was all of these things at once, and something more. The Oxford Latin Dictionary needed a dozen words just to…
- Corpus Juris CivilisThe Corpus Juris Civilis, which translates literally as "Body of Civil Law," was assembled between 529 and 534 by order of the Roman Emperor Justinian I. It is the foundation of virtually every legal system in the Western world that traces…
- Colonies in antiquityColonies in antiquity could stay loyal to a distant mother-city for generations, or break free the moment they were founded. In 814 or 813 BC, settlers from Tyre raised a city on the coast of North Africa and named it Kart-Hadasht, meaning…
- Edict of MilanThe Edict of Milan did not make Christianity the official religion of Rome. That is the first misconception worth clearing up. What happened on the 13th of February 313 AD was something more nuanced and, in its way, more remarkable. Two…
- Roman tribeA Roman tribe decided what a man owed in taxes, how he was conscripted into the army, and where his vote was counted. In the most formal inscriptions, a citizen's tribal name appeared between his family lineage and his personal cognomina.…
- ImperiumImperium was the word ancient Romans used for the kind of power that could not be argued with. It came from imperare, the Latin verb meaning to command, and in its oldest form it described something close to kingly authority. The listener…
- Patronage in ancient RomePatronage in ancient Rome was, according to Greek historians Dionysius and Plutarch, one of the earliest concerns of Romulus himself. That means the system was dated to the very founding of Rome. Before there were roads, before there were…
- Roman magistrateRoman magistrates held a kind of power that modern democracies have spent centuries trying to limit, balance, and ultimately escape. In 509 BC, when Rome expelled its last king and founded the Republic, the question at the heart of the new…