βιβλία λβ [libri 32]. Number of extracts from this work in the Digest, 340. It appears to have been completed in the lifetime of Antoninus Pius. (Dig. 24. tit. 1. s. 42, Dig. 2. tit. 1. s. 11.)

[Juliam et Papiam Poppaeam], βιβλία δεκαπέντε. (The names added between brackets are the names as they appear in inscriptions of fragments in the Digest.) Number of extracts, 28. Gaius refers to this work in his Institutes (3.54). It seems to have been published after the death of Antoninus Pius. (Dig. 31. s. 56.)

[praetoris urbani], τὰ μόνα εὐρεθέντα βιβλία δέκα. Extracts, 47. The Edicti Interpretatio, which may have designated the work on the Provincial Edict, together with the work on the City Edict, is mentioned by Gaius in his Institutes (1.188), and was probably written in the reign of Antoninus Pius (Dig. 30. s. 73.1). The work on the City Edict was divided into tituli, and the subjects of the books and tituli are occasionally cited in the inscriptions of fragments. Some of the tituli seem to have formed books by themselves (compare the inscriptions of Dig. 7. tit. 7. s. 4, Dig. 10. tit. 4. s. 13, Dig. 38. tit. 2. s. 30); others seem to have comprehended several books. There were at least two books De Testamentis, and three De Legatis (Dig. 28. tit. 5. s. 32 and s. 33, Dig. 30. s. 65, Dig. 30. s. 69, Dig. 30. s. 73).

[Aureorum seu Rerum Quotidianarum], βιβλία ἑπτά. Extracts, 26. This work, treating of legal doctrines of general application and utility in every-day life, seems to have formed a compendium of practical law. The name Aurea was probably a subsequent title, not proceeding from the author, bust given to the work on account of its value. Though, according to the Index Florentinus, it consisted of seven books, only three are cited in the Digest, whence some have conjectured that the last four books are identical with the Institutes of Gaius. The preferable opinion, however, is, that the and the though they had much in common, were distinct works. (Savigny's Zeitschrift, vol. i. p. 54-77; Hugo, Civilist. May,. vol. vi. p. 228-264.) Justinian, in his Institutes, made considerable use of this Golden Work ( § 6).

Δοδεκαδέλτου (sic, sed qu. Δυοδεκαδέλτου vel Δωδεκαδέλτου) βιβλία ἕξͅ. Extracts, 20. This is the work, the beginning of which has been supposed, on account of the citations in Lydus, to resemble part of the of Pomponius, and to have borrowed some of its historical details from Gracchanus.

(Institutionum), βιβλία τέσσαρα. Extracts, 14. An account of this famous work is given below.

βιβλία γ. Extracts, 12.

βιβλία τρία Extracts, 5.

[Fideicommissorum], βιβλία δύο. Extracts, 12. This work was published after the death of Antoninus Pius. (Dig. 35. tit. 1. s. 90, Dig. 32. s. 96, Dig. 36. tit. 1. s. 63.5.) A Liber singularis de tacitis Fideicommissis, not mentioned in the Index, is cited, Dig. 34. tit. 9. s. 23.

βιβλίον ἕν. Extracts, 7. We have already explained the purport of this work.

[Regularum], βιβλίον ἕν. There is but one extract from this work in the Digest (Dig. 1. tit. 7. s. 21), unless there is some error in the Index or in the inscriptions. Gaius appears to have written another treatise in three books on Regulae, or rules of law. (Dig. 50. tit. 17. s. 100 ; Dig. 47. tit. 10. s. 43.)

[Dotaliciorum]. Though this work is mentioned in the Index, there is not a single extract from it in the Digest. It is probably the same with the which was one of the four libri singulares of Gaius, that were used for instruction in the law schools. (Const. Omnem, § 1.) Of the other three libri singulares, unless they were extracted from the larger work on the edict, nothing is known.

Ὑποθηκαρίας [Ad formulam hypothecariam], βιβλίον ἕν. Extracts, 6.

Besides other titles of works, which have been already incidentally mentioned as not inserted in the Florentine Index, we read Gaius, ad Edictum Aedilium Curulium Libri duo, in the inscriptions of eleven fragments, and Gaius, ad Legem Gliciam, in the inscription of Dig. 5. tit. 2. s. 4. Of the Lex Glicia no mention occurs elsewhere, and consequently the genuineness of the inscription has been doubted. (Bynkerschoeck. Obs. 2.12.)

Great as are the intrinsic merits of Gaius as a jurist, he yet owes some of his celebrity to the recent discovery of his genuine Institutes, in a state so nearly perfect, that the resuscitated treatise forms by far the most complete specimen in existence, of an original unmutilated work, which has survived the wreck of classical Roman jurisprudence.

It was a common practice in the middle ages to wash out the relics of antiquity, in order to economise the parchment on which they were written. When washing alone would not expunge the writing--as often happened in the case of manuscripts written on the once hairy side of the parchment--the characters were further scratched out with a knife. A father of the Church sometimes covered the pages which had before contained the works of some profane dramatist. Not unfrequently the parchment was a second time submitted to the same treatment. The father who had supplanted the dramatist was himself washed and rubbed out in order, peradventure, to give place to some scholastic doctor.

In the library of the Chapter at Verona is a codex formerly numbered xv., but now xiii., containing a manuscript of the of St. Jerome (Hieronymus), written over an older manuscript. Nearly one fourth part of the codex was bis rescriptus, and where this was the case, it seems that St. Jerome had also been the second occupant. The manuscript first written on the parchment consisted of 251 pages, and each page of 24 lines. One leaf or two pages, 235 and 236, concerning Prescriptions and Interdicts, had been detached from the rest of the manuscript, and escaped being overlaid by St. Jerome. These two detached pages, together with four other pages detached from some other codex, and containing the fragment of an uncertain author De Jure Fisci, had been found in the library of Verona before the year 1732, by the celebrated Scipio Maffei. He describes them in his 100.7. p. 464 (8vo. Verona, 1732). In his (fol. Trento, 1742,) the greater part of both fragments was first published, and in plate x. a facsimile was given of part of the writing of the fragment De Interdictis. From the part of this facsimile was copied and republished, not very accurately, in the vol. iii. p. 208. tab. 46 (Paris, 1757). Maffei had observed a correspondence between the fragment De Interdictis and the 15th title of the 4th book of Justinian's Institutes; but, instead of recognizing Gaius, whose text was the basis of Justinian's work, he supposed that the leaf he had found was part of an interpretation or compendium of Justinian's Institutes, made by some later jurist. To Maffei, however, belongs the credit of having first given to the world two pages of the manuscript of the genuine Gaius.

It had not escaped the notice of Maffei that the manuscript of the letters of St. Jerome was a codex rescriptus. This appears by his unpublished remarks in the Catalogue of the Library; but he did not know what the subject of the obliterated writing was, and was not aware of the connection between that manuscript and the detached leaf which had drawn his attention.

The fragment concerning Interdicts, published by Maffei, had not been unobserved by Haubold. He determined to recal it to the memory of German jurists, and prepared an essay for that purpose, which was published at Leipzig in 1816, under the title of and is to be found in his collected Opuscula, vol. ii. p. 327-346.

By chance, while the essay of Haubold was in preparation, but not yet published, in the year 1816, Niebuhr was despatched to Rome by the king of Prussia, as minister to the Apostolic See. On his way, he spent the greater part of two days in examining the cathedral library of Verona, and made wonderfully good use of his limited time. Beside copying the manuscript of the fragment De Jure Fisci, he copied, fully and accurately, the fragment concerning Interdicts and Prescriptions. and did not hesitate to ascribe the latter fragment to its real author, Gaius. He proceeded to examine Codex xiii., and by means of the infusion of nutgalls, was able to decipher the 97th leaf of the obliterated writing, which he at once recognised as an important work of a most ancient jurist, whom he at first supposed to be Ulpian. The fruits of his researches he communicated by letter to Savigny, by whom they were printed in the third volume of the Savigny added a learned and acute commentary of his own, and put forward the felicitous conjecture, amply verified in the sequel, that the ancient text of codex xiii. contained the genuine Institutes of Gaius, and that the fragment concerning Prescriptions and Interdicts had formerly been a part of that codex.

The fame of this discovery was soon diffused among the jurists of the continent. In May, 1817, the Royal Academy of Berlin despatched to Verona Göschen and Bekker, charged with the task of transcribing the manuscript, and the place of Bekker was shortly afterwards supplied by Bethmann Hollweg. With scrupulous accuracy did Göschen, assisted by Hollweg, fulfil his difficult commission. The original manuscript, in the opinion of the palaeographer Kopp (Savigny's Zeitschrift, vol. iv. p. 475), was anterior to Justinian's legal reforms. The scribe, like the majority of legal writers in our own country at the present day, employed a great variety of contractions, and whole words were often expressed by initial letters. The old order of the leaves was much deranged. There were very few pages where the parchment had not been entirely written over, and, in more than 60 pages, it was bis rescriptus. The new writing was in general directly over the old. In order to prepare the parchment, it had been washed, apparently bleached in the sun, and in some places scraped by a knife. Notwithstanding these difficulties, by far the greater portion of the Institutes of Gaius has been preserved to us. Probably not one tenth of the whole work is wanting. It is true that certain parts of the extant leaves resisted all attempts at decyphering, and that three leaves, namely, the leaf following p. 80, the leaf following p. 126, and the leaf following p. 194, are missing. The argument of the first missing leaf may be collected from the West Gothic and the whole contents of the second missing leaf have been luckily preserved in an ancient extract, made by the author of the but the loss of the third missing leaf is very tantalizing, for it doubtless contained some particulars relative to the old legis actiones, which we are left without any means of supplying. A few of the gaps which are occasioned by the impossibility of decyphering are also very lamentable, for they occur in the most obscure parts of the work, -- in parts where the curiosity of the antiquary is raised highest, and all the ingenuity of conjecture possessed by the ablest critics has been unable satisfactorily to fill them up.

The decyphered volume was anxiously looked for. In 1819, the first printed sheet of it appeared, but not until 1821 was the first complete edition of the work brought out by Göschen. Its publication excited an unusual sensation among the jurists of the continent. It was considered to form an era in the study of Roman Law. It was found to elucidate doubts, and clear up difficulties, before regarded as hopeless. By the true explanation it afforded, many an ingeniously constructed theory was demolished. Modern jurists were thus suddenly placed upon a vantage ground, from which they looked down upon their less fortunate predecessors. The authenticity of the discovered Institutes was beyond dispute. This was clear from internal evidence, which would prove a forger to have possessed miraculous knowledge and sagacity. The work was found to agree with the Institutes of Justinian, which were derived from it. It was the manifest source of the Gothic Epitome. It contained all the passages cited from the Institutes of Gaius in the Digest, in the by Böethius (Ad Cic. Topica, 3.5. sub fin.), and by Priscian (Ars Gram. vi. sub fin.).

The Institutes of Gaius are thought to have been the first work of the kind, not a compilation from previous sources. As they became a popular manual at Rome, so are they perhaps to the modern student the best initiation into the Roman law, especially if they are read along with the Institutes of Justinian and the of Theophilus. They are composed in a clear and terse style, which is well suited to a technical treatise, and does not often fail to satisfy the requisitions of pure Latinity. The author always has a meaning, and seldom expresses his meaning badly. The difficulties which occur in his Institutes usually depend either on our ignorance of collateral facts and legal rules, or upon a train of reasoning which demands attention, or upon distinctions which the intellect cannot comprehend without effort. Gaius is not a learned historian ; he seeks not the merit of a critical philologer, and does not push his logic so inconveniently as to assail the latent flaws of established law; but his history, his etymologies, and his logic bear a certain stamp of technical propriety They are good enough for their purpose of assisting the memory, and facilitating the understanding of legal doctrine. He does not exhibit the details of refined philosophical analysis, and pursue with lucid order the prescriptions of scientific method; but yet the basis of his arrangement will appear, upon examination, to be solid and profound; and the sequence in which his subjects are treated has been found so practically satisfactory, that it has been received, with little alteration and improvement, by the majority of those who have followed in his track. " Omne jus quo utimur, vel ad personas pertinet, vel ad res, vel ad actiones." This celebrated division rests on the notion of a subject, an object, and a copula, connecting the subject with the object. Thinkers had not failed to dwell on the elementary distinction between a man and all that was not himself. They had seen that the relations between a man and the rest of the universe were changed and modified by his own acts and by external events. In the schools of philosophy, these considerations had led to divisions of human knowledge, analogous to the threefold division of law laid down by Gaius. Our author, however, seems to have contented himself with general notions, and not to have formed in his own mind any precise definition of the boundaries between the law relating to persons, the law relating to things and the law relating to actions. The order of his Institutes may be accounted for by some such analysis as the following:--Law treats of rights. Differences of rights result from permanent differences in those who possess rights--the subject of right--persons ; and also from differences in that over which rights are exercised--the objects of right--things. Besides the varieties of rights attributable butable to permanent differences in persons, and natural or conventional differences in things, there are new and altered rights, which arise from external events and from voluntary acts. Of external events, death, which necessitates the devolution of property by succession, is in law of the utmost importance. From the voluntary legal dealings of men, and other changes of the circumstances in which they are placed, result transitory and particular rights of various kinds, with their corresponding obligations. Further, in order to redress any violation of those earlier rights, which alone would have to be considered, if men acted legally, the law establishes secondary rights--remedies for violation of right, and rights of action. The first book of the Institutes of Gaius treats of the distinctions of persons. In this it follows the genius of the Roman law, which owes much of its distinctive character to the great legal differences that originally subsisted between different classes of men. There are systems of jurisprudence in which it might perhaps be better to begin with an average law, not resting on peculiarities of class or status. Rights commonly rest, in modern systems, on an average level, from which the student may rise or sink to those inequalities of surface which depend on anomalous distinctions; but the law of Rome may rather be compared to a country which has its surface disposed in separate platforms or terraces of considerable extent. Gaius first considers men as free (liberi ) or slaves (servi); freemen he subdivides into ingenui and libertini ; and libertini he distinguishes as they are cives Romani, aut Latini, aut Dediticiorum numero. Here naturally he speaks of manumissions. Next, following a division which crosses the former, he divides personae into those who are sui juris, and those who are alieno juri subjectae. Under the latter head he speaks of the child in potestate parentis, of the wife in manu mariti, of the slave in mancipio domini. Persons who are sui juris are divided into those who are under tutela, those who are under cura, and those who are under neither tutela nor cura. With the second book begins the law, quod ad res perlinet. Some things are divini juris, others humani juris; some, again, are corporales, some incorporales. After explaining these distinctions, Gaius proceeds to the distinction of things into res mancipi and res nec mancipi. From the latter distinction (which depends upon technical rules relating to the mode of transferring property), he goes on to investigate the various modes of acquiring and transferring singulae res, as opposed to the acquisition and devolution of property in a lump. He is then naturally led to consider quibus modis per universitatem res nobis acquiruntur, and herein, to treat of hereditas. He treats of testate succession before intestacy, and arranges under the former head, as a kind of appendix, the law of legacies (legata) and fideicommissa; for though these are not proper examples of acquisitio per universitatem, they cannot be conveniently separated from the law of hereditas. The third book begins with the law of intestate succession, and proceeds (3.88) to the doctrine of obligationes. There has been great controversy among modern jurists whether the law relating to actions does not begin where obligationes are first introduced to our notice. The great modern maintainer of the proposition that the law of actions commences with obligationes was the late Hugo, who discussed the subject at large in his (vol. iv. p. 1, and vol. v. p. 385), and returned to his favourite proposition in one of his latest essays. (Götting. Gelethre Anzeigen, 1840, p. 1033-1039.) He has undoubtedly in his favour the express declaration of Theophilus (3.14. pr., and 4.6, init.), but the opposite view (adopted by Vinnius, Thibaut, and others), which ranks obligationes with res, appears to be more in accordance with the form of the Institutes of Gaius. After treating of corporeal things--things which entitle their owner to the name of dominus--Gaius passes easily to obligationes, which are res incorporates, and give name to a kind of ownership distinct from dominium. The word obligatio properly expresses the connection between the person who has a right and the person who owes the corresponding duty; hence, in ordinary language, its meaning has been transferred to denote the duty, whereas in legal phraseology it is often employed to signify the right. It is not unlikely that, from the close relationship between the law of obligationes and the law of actions, and from the ambiguity of the word actio, which may apply to acts unconnected with judicial procedure, Gaius, and other jurists who succeeded him, may have avoided any precise definition of their grand division of law, and have placed obligationes in an intermediate situation, where they might be held to occupy an independent territory, or whence they might be transferred to the territory either of res or of actiones, as convenience might dictate. It we class them with res, we must admit that they require special and separate attention, seeing that they are differently created, transferred, and ended from other res. The summa divisio of obligationes is into two species--obligatio ex contractu, and obligatio ex delicto (3.88). In this Gaius differed from the Institutes of Justinian, which, out of the anomalous obligationes that remain, make two other general species, namely, obligationes quasi ex contractu and obligationes quasi ex delicto. Of obligationes ex contractu there are four kinds : re contrahuntur, aut verbis, aut literis, aut consensu (3.89). Of obligationes ex delicto, Gaius also instances four kinds : veluti si quis furtum fecerit, bona rapuerit, damnum dederit, injuriam commiserit (3.182). With the fourth and last book Gaius begins the law of actions, as connected with judicial procedure. After the general division of actiones into actiones in rem and actiones in personam, he treats of the ancient legis actiones and of formulae, exceptiones, and praescriptiones, and he gives an account of the several kinds of interdicta. With these topics are mingled various rules of law relating to different branches of judicial procedure.

The above is an imperfect sketch of the topics handled in the Institutes of Gaius. As to his mode of handling them, it is to be observed, that he treats rather of the dynamics than of the staties of law,--rather of those events or forces by which classes of rights begin, are modified or terminate, than of those rights and duties which accompany a given stationary legal relation. Thus, in treating of the jus quod ad personas pertinet, when he comes to the patria potestas, it is not his object to explain the mutual rights and duties of parents and children, but to point out the cases and events in which those rights and duties arise or cease.

In the published under Alaric II. in A. D. 506, for the use of the Roman subjects of the Westgothic kingdom, the Institutes of Gaius appear, remodelled in barbarous fashion. They have been worse treated than the Theodosian Code and other legal works introduced into the same collection; for while a barbarous interpretation (scintilla) was subjoined to the text of the other works, Gaius was found to be so full of antiquated law, that his text, in its original state, would have been unsuitable to the character of the times. Accordingly, it was so altered and mutilated as not to want an interpretatio. The Gothic Epitome of Gaius, disfigured and imperfect as it is, is now of little use, since the discovery of the genuine Institutes, except for the purpose of understanding ancient quotations made from it, and of assisting in the restoration of the valuable original. It consists, according to the ordinary division (for the manuscripts vary in this point), of two books, and contains no abstract of the fourth book of the genuine Gaius, concerning actions. It has been ably commented upon by Schulting, who gives a selection from the notes of preceding commentators (Jurisp. Antejust. p. 1-186), and by Meerman (Thesaurus, vol. vii. p. 669-686). It is edited by Haubold in the Berlin Jus. Civ. Ante-Just. and by Böcking in the Bonn Corp. Jur. Ante-J.

The or has been itself the theme of a corrupt abridgment of the second order, in base Italian Latin, interesting, perhaps, to a philological student. Those who are anxious to see to what extent an ancient monument may be defaced and deformed, may consult the at the end of the fourth volume of Canciani's Leges Barbarorum. The following may be taken as a favourable specimen :--" Incipit liber Gagii i. Interpr. Ingenuorum statum unum est. Nam libertorum vero trea genera sunt. Injenui vero stint, qui de injenuos parents nascuntur. Liberti sunt, sicut jam diximus,trea genera : hoc est, cive Romanum, et Latine, et Divicicii."