"The libri ad edictum of Iulius Paulus"

The project deals with a question from Roman law. The so-called commentary on the edict by Iulius Paulus, a late classical Roman jurist, is to be examined more precisely.

Until now, research on this work has assumed that it is a lemmatic commentary on the edict of the Roman praetor. The consequence would be that Paulus, in his libri ad edictum, commented on the praetor's promises of legal protection lemma by lemma. That Paulus actually wrote a lemmatic commentary on the praetor's edict, however, seems quite doubtful.

The difficulty of a precise analysis of the text lies in the fact that it has not come down to us in the original. Rather, it has been transmitted in excerpts through the great legislative work of the late Roman Emperor Justinian from the sixth century AD. Under Justinian, an attempt was made in Constantinople to codify Roman law comprehensively. The basis for this project was provided by the writings of the classical Roman jurists, excerpts of which were compiled into a part of the Corpus Iuris Civilis - the Digesta. In doing so, the Justinianic compilers primarily used the works of the late classical jurist Ulpian, but also made extensive use of Paulus' libri ad edictum.

The Corpus Iuris Civilis itself served the jurist Otto Lenel in the late 19th century as the basis for an attempt to reconstruct the texts of the classical jurists, which he presented in his so-called Palingenesie. The reconstruction is limited to the sequence of the fragments, whereby the information of the Justinian compilers, who preceded the excerpts from the respective classic works with a brief indication of author and work, served as a starting point.

On the basis of this reconstruction, the libri ad edictum will now be analysed with regard to their content and structure, in order to make a statement about the genre of the text and its recipients.