The Roman Jurist's Prudential Tradition

The Roman jurists from the late republic onwards, I think are quite conscious of themselves as a class. So Gaius is not going to jettison that the rest of the thinking that he's engaging with when he writes his institutes within that legal context in favour of something which we would perhaps call a more philosophical attitude. Most of our textual material comes from the 6th century digest of the Emperor Justinian. You have a 6th century Byzantine emperor cutting all of the various texts of these ancient jurists up into little pieces and then literally pasting them together.