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17 Roman Legal Trad. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/rltrad17 and id is 1 raw text is: Paul Kruger, Theodor Mommsen, and the
Theodosian Code
Peter Riedlberger and Isabel Niemoller*
Abstract - The present article contains a full transcription plus an
English translation of Mommsen's and Kruger's correspondence
regarding the Theodosian Code edition, as far as it is extant. This
so far largely unpublished material shows that the gloomy picture
of Mommsen robbing Kruger of his work and due honors (painted
by Matthews and others) has little to do with reality. In a nutshell,
Kruger's complaint was not that Mommsen appropriated and used
his material, but rather that Mommsen rejected it and preferred to
start from scratch.
Nor is it convincing to call Kruger's later edition - into which
he conjecturally incorporated material from the Justinian Code -
nearer to the original Theodosian Code. This woefully downplays
the fact that such additions may only inform us about some further
topics which were treated in the original Theodosian Code. The
legal rule itself, however, could be modified, possibly to its exact
opposite, and since we know that the Justinian Code compilers
created a structure quite independent from their Theodosian
predecessors, the position assigned to a given Justinian Code
fragment is rarely more than mere guesswork.
Conversely, the real merits of Kruger's edition have mostly
gone unnoticed. When it comes to readings of R or completion of
lost bits of T, Mommsen was often overconfident, and it certainly
makes sense to check Kriger's alternative ideas.
* This article is part of a project that has received funding from the
European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon
2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 677638.
Peter Riedlberger is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg,
Germany. Isabel Niemaller is an independent scholar based in Munich,
Germany.
The following are cited in an abbreviated form: C.Th. = Codex Theo-
dosianus; C.I. = Codex Iustinianus; Mommsen, Prolegomena = T. Momm-
sen, Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis. Voluminis I
pars prior. Prolegomena (Berlin 1905).
Roman Legal Tradition, 17 (2021), 1-112. ISSN 1943-6483. Published by the Ames Foundation
at the Harvard Law School and the Alan Rodger Endowment at the University of Glasgow. This
work is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0. Copyright © 2021 by Peter
Riedlberger and Isabel Niemoller. All rights reserved apart from those granted above.
ROMAN LEGALT RADITIO N.ORG

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