Page:Gaii institutionum iuris civilis commentarii quattuor, or, Elements of Roman law by Gaius (Poste, Third Edition, 1890, gaiiinstitution00gaiu).djvu/14

viii named without this epithet, but in 2 § 195 has the style of Divus. Marcus Aurelius was probably named, 2 § 126, and the Institutions were probably published before his death, for 2 § 177, as above mentioned, contains no notice of a constitution of his, recorded by Ulpian, that bears on the matter in question. Paragraphs 3 § 24, § 25 would hardly have been penned after the Sc. Orphitianum, 178, or the Sc. Tertullianum, 158.

In the text of Gaius, the words or portions of words which are purely conjectural are denoted by italics. The orthography of the Veronese MS. is extremely inconstant. Some of these inconstancies it will be seen are retained; e.g. the spelling oscillates between the forms praegnas and praegnaus, nanctus and nactus, erciscere and herciscere, prendere and prehendere, diminuere and deminuere, parentum and parentium, vulgo and volgo, apud and aput, sed and set, proxumus and proximus, affectus and adfectus, inponere and imponere, &c. Some irregularities likely to embarrass the reader, e.g. the substitutoin of v for b in debitor and probare, the substitution of b for v in servus and vitium, have been tacitly corrected. The numeration of the paragraphs was introduced by Goeschen in his first edition of Gaius, and for convenience of of reference has been retained by all subsequent editors. The rubrics or titles marking the larger divisions of the subject, with the exception of a few at the beginning, are not found in the Veronese MS. Those that are found are supposed not to be the work of Gaius, but of a transcriber. The remainder are partly taken from the corresponding sections of Justinian's Institutes, partly invented or adopted from other editors.

An elementary treatise can scarcely make any profession of originality. I have availed myself of lights wherever I could obtain them. And, not to crowd the following pages with references to the writers to whom I am indebted, I must here once for acknowledge my obligation, not to mention many authors from whom I have borrowed isolated views or quotations, to Austin, to Ortolan, to Puchta, to Ihering, to Bethmann-Hollweg, and above all to Vangerow and Von Savigny.

The present edition differs from its predecessors not only by various corrections and additions, and by adjustment of the trans-