Wills In The Roman Empire

Maria Nowak

The present book deals with the testamentary practice as seen through papyri, tablets, doctrinal and literary sources, manuscript tradition, etc. mostly in the period after the constitutio Antoniniana. The aim of Wills in the Roman empire: a documentary approach is to reconstruct how people applied law and how testamentary practice looked like in everyday life: how wills were made and opened, what was the meaning of particular dispositions. These questions constitute a part of a wider discussion concerning the level of knowledge and application of Roman law in the provinces after the edict of Caracalla. The book is supplemented with four Appendices, where all wills from the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods are collected for the first time in scholarly literature.