The Many Lives of a Legal Text: Catalogues of Actions from Roman to Byzantine Law

The so-called ‘action catalogues’ form a subgenre within Byzantine legal literature, which has been transmitted both independently as well as inserted within other legal works. This makes them an ideal case study for examining the factors that enable certain Roman legal concepts (or even entire legal works) to survive in later Byzantine law, even when the structure of the new legal system may change substantially over the centuries.