Gaius

Gaius, a Roman jurist, who flourished between 130 and 180 A.D. Of his personal history next to nothing is known. Before the revision of the Roman laws, and the reform of legal studies by Justinian, the Institutes of Gaius, as well as four other of his treatises, were the received text-books of the schools of law. His Institutes, moreover, formed the groundwork of the Institutes of Justinian. The other works of Gaius, of which we have little more than the titles, were largely used in the compilation of the Digest, which contains no fewer than 535 extracts from his writings. The Institutes was, like the others, almost completely lost, until in 1816 Niebuhr discovered it at Verona, under a palimpsest of the Epistles of Jerome. This discovery threw a flood of light upon the history of the early development of Roman law, especially upon the forms of procedure in civil actions. The first book treated of status and family relations; the second, of things and of how possession of them may be acquired, including the law relating to wills; the third, of intestate succession and obligations; and the fourth and last, of actions. Alaric II., king of the West Goths, promulgated in 506, for the use of his Roman subjects, the code known as Breviarium Alarici, which contains copious excerpts from Gaius. Of numerous editions of the Institutes published since 1817, may be mentioned those in fac-simile by Böcking (Leip. 1866) and Studemund (Leip. 1874), and with an English translation by E. Porte (2d ed. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1875) and James Muirhead (Edin. 1880).