GAIUS, THE MOST INFLUENTIAL OF CLASSICAL JURISTS, is apparently a modern discovery. The dramatic story of his resurrection has often been told. In i8i6 the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr came across a manuscript in Verona, a text from Saint Jerome written over a much earlier work. He reported this palimpsest (at some points ter scriptus, a double palimpsest) to his friend Friedrich Karl von Savigny, the greatest legal scholar of the age and the emerging leader of the so-called Historical School of Law. Savigny immediately recognized it as the work of the second-century jurist Gaius, otherwise preserved only in fragmentary form in that great sixth-century anthology, the Digest of Justinian. Let us hope that we can decipher more of Gaius in these pages, he wrote to Niebuhr. (So it fortunately turned out, for over eleventwelfths of the Institutes of Civil Law were recovered with the help of this manuscript.) will surely give new life to our jurist, Savigny predicted.2 This book, the only nearly complete pre-Justinianian text, has indeed had a profound impact upon Roman legal history and scholarship since its publication in 1820. Yet in a deeper sense Gaius had never really been lost to view. Despite the elementary and defective form in which his work was transmitted, the structure of his Institutes can be traced in the thought of many generations not only of jurists but also of historians and of political and social philosophers. Whether consisting of notes by Gaius himself or by a student (the same sort of debate that has raged around the works of Aristotle), the book became more influential than those of more authoritative jurists like Ulpian and Pomponius (who, unlike Gaius, possessed the right to interpret the law, the jus respondendi). Distilling, simplifying, and organizing the resources of ancient legal