Roman Law from the Desert: A.S. Hunt, F. de Zulueta, E. Levy, V. Arangio-Ruiz and the Editing of Legal Papyri

The Papyrology Rooms of the Sackler Library, Oxford, preserve the correspondence of the two famous papyrologists, B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt, conducted with numerous scholars from Britain and continental Europe. The main subject of this correspondence is the editing of the texts found in the Oxyrhynchus papyri. On some of the most important legal papyri, namely P.Oxy. 1814, 2089 and especially 2103 (the ‘Oxyrhynchus Gaius’), Hunt sought out the collaboration of Roman law scholars such as F. de Zulueta, W.W. Buckland and E. Levy, who all participated to a varying degree in the editorial process of these legal documents. These letters, some of them hitherto unknown, are here published for the first time. They reveal the extent of the collaboration especially between Hunt and de Zulueta, the Regius Professor of Civil Law in Oxford. In addition to this correspondence, another letter on the same theme was discovered in the University Library of Aberdeen, where de Zulueta’s personal library is now located. It was sent to de Zulueta by the Italian Roman law scholar V. Arangio-Ruiz, who was then editing the PSI 1182 (the ‘Florentine Gaius’), and shows the ongoing dialogue between the two scholars on this important legal papyrus. Taken together, these letters allow a reconstruction of the editorial process applied to some of the most significant witnesses of Roman law sources unearthed in the 20th century. This in turn provokes reflection on the desirability of submitting the standard editions of these sources to a new critical analysis