Letters of the Law: Saturninus the Helmsman, Pliny and Friends’ Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.15 (2/12/13)
Jill Harries: ‘Letters of the Law: Saturninus the helmsman, Pliny and Friends’ Working Papers in Nervan, Trajanic and Hadrianic Literature 1.15 (2/12/13) Letters of the law: Saturninus the helmsman, Pliny and Friends. Sailors should be wary of trusting other sailors. This was the moral to be drawn from an exchange of letters late in the first century CE between a lawyer and a (now) anonymous client. The text, corrupted by centuries of manuscript transmission now lost to the record, prior to its incorporation in Justinian’s Digest of Roman Law in 533 CE, derives from the eleventh book in a collection of Epistulae compiled by Pliny’s distinguished older contemporary, Iavolenus Priscus, consul under Domitian and famous as a iuris peritus, a ‘man skilled in law’ or jurist: Anonymous (we do not know the writer’s name) to his friend Priscus greetings (Anonymus Prisco suo salutem), [Seius] Saturninus the chief helmsman from the British fleet left in his will an inheritance in trust to his heir-executor Valerius Maximus, the ship’s captain, whom he requested to restore the inheritance to his son [Seius] Oceanus, when he had reached the age of sixteen. [Seius] Oceanus, before he reached the stated age, died; now, one Mallius Seneca, who says he is the uncle of [Seius] Oceanus, is claiming these goods on the grounds of close kinship, but Maximus the ship’s captain claims them for himself, because the person to whom he had been instructed to restore the property is now deceased. [I ask therefore] Do these goods belong to Valerius Maximus the captain
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