Announcement Calenda 1224843
Justinian's Institutes are among the West's most matrix-like texts. Yet for the most part, as we have known since the discovery of the Verona palimpsest in 1816, they are a reworking of the work of Gaius, who wrote in the early 160s AD, and which was placed in 533 as an introduction to the vast compilation of Roman law that the Eastern emperor was having made, the legal component of the restoration of the grandeur of the entire empire that he was undertaking. The thoughts of a rather obscure Oriental professor, perhaps not even a citizen in his own time, through the intermediary of an emperor four centuries later, thus provided a model which gave its outline to the Civil Code of 1804, and whose influence is still very much felt today.
Nothing would be more misleading than to see it as a perpetuation of the same thing. Inheritance should be viewed from the bottom up, not the top down. Within a Roman law marked by its casuistic origins and Justinian recomposition, the legal West found in the Institutes, particularly after the Cartesian shift, an overall apprehension of the law conducive to its presentation as a system. What is at stake here is not the transmission of authenticity, but the fact that generation after generation, since Justinian's Corpus re-emerged, the text has been used, commented on and, above all, translated into French more than twenty times. The recent translation by Professors Cocatre-Zielgen and Coriat (Dalloz, 2021) thus continues a continuous chain of appropriations, all dependent on the previous ones but all different.
