Duplicate Texts and the Compilation of the Digest

Abstract

Efforts to investigate the compilation of Justinian's Digest go back in one way or another to Friedrich Bluhme's 1820 article on the regular sequence of inscriptions in the Digest titles, a sequence that is especially visible in D 50.16 and 50.17. This includes the phenomenon of duplicate texts (leges geminae/geminatae), on which Bluhme also compiled, in the same year, a special study. Duplicate texts tell us something about how the Digest commissioners worked, and especially about the different attitudes of the three committees towards excerpting texts for the Digest.