Content area
Full text
Frier (B.W.) (ed.) The Codex of Justinian. A New Annotated Translation, with Parallel Latin and Greek Text. Based on a Translation by Justice Fred H. Blume. Volume 1: Introductory Matter and Books I-III. Volume 2: Books IV-VII. Volume 3: Books VIII-XII . Pp. clxxxvi + viii + viii + 3,176, ills. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2016. Cased, £450, US$750. ISBN: 978-1-107-11975-8 (vol. 1); 978-1-107-11981-9 (vol. 2); 978-1-107-11982-6 (vol. 3); 978-0-521-19682-6 (set).
Reviews
The sixth-century Codex of Justinian is one of the most important legal works in the history of western law. Much like the group of experts directed by the emperor to create the Code itself, general editor F. and his team of savvy Roman legal experts personify what can be done when great minds work together for a common goal. The first part of the three-volume set pays tribute to the history of the translation itself; the first reliable English translation made from the standard Latin edition of the Codex of Justinian.1This impressive publication is based on the early twentieth-century translations of Friedrich Heinrich Blume, a Wyoming Supreme Court judge. Blume had immigrated from Germany at the age of twelve and later graduated from the State University of Iowa (later called the University of Iowa) in 1898. After moving to Wyoming, beginning to practice law and losing steam in the political arena, he turned to a productive period of otium by annotating and translating Justinian's famed legal codex. Blume also corresponded regularly with Clyde Pharr, a professor of Greek and Latin at Vanderbilt University, who was working on the translation of legal texts. As L. Jones Hall has remarked ('Clyde Pharr, the Women of Vanderbilt, and the Wyoming Judge: the Story behind the Translation of the Theodosian Code in Mid-Century America', Roman Legal Tradition 8 [2012], 1-42), Pharr was notorious for appropriating and often taking credit for the translations of graduate students, female research assistants and even his spouse. While Pharr wished to publish translations for the entirety of Roman law, his consortium produced only the Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions (1952) and Ancient Roman Statutes (1961) before his death. However, Blume's translation did not go unnoticed. After the death of the judge in 1971,...