Up till a few years ago readers in the Ashmolean Library in Oxford who took down the library's copy of the Digest would find themselves experiencing a curious journey in time. For from between the pages there would drop out leaves from German calendars of the early I920S. If these have now disappeared, the pages themselves still contain scores of minute and precise textual notes in pencil, made by Eduard Fraenkel, whose books came to the library in I970 after his death. The notes too date to the I920S, and bore fruit in Fraenkel's article 'Zum Texte romischer Juristen', Hernes LX (I925), 4I5, reprinted in Kleine Beitrage II, 4I7. Perhaps that was not in fact the last moment at which any established Classical scholar took an interest in the textual transmission of the Digest, or in the jurists whose works are excerpted there. But no one will deny that such an interest is rare to the point of eccentricity. Yet the majority of these works are the products of men born in the second century, at the height of the outward prosperity and stability of the Empire, when the Latin language and Roman literature were the common possession of more people than ever before, and the citizenship was soon to be extended to all. Even Greeks, grudgingly or otherwise, had to acknowledge the significance of all this. 'Nowadays, however, the topic of law is of no use (in an encomium of a city), since we conduct public affairs by the common laws of the Romans' (Menander Rhetor, trans. Russell and Wilson, p. 67). Others took a more positive, if still somewhat ambivalent attitude: 'those admirable laws of ours, by which the affairs of all men under Roman rule are governed, and which were neither composed nor can be mastered without toil, being themselves wise, precise, varied, admirable, and in a word very Hellenic'. So writes Gregorius, later to be bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, on his once projected course of study in Roman law, which he would have pursued at Berytus in about A.D. 230 (Address to Origen 7, ed. H. Crouzel, SC I48). (For a sketch of the issues relating to the reception of Roman law in the Greek world see F. Millar, 'Culture grecque et culture latine dans le Haut-Empire: la loi et la foi', Les martyrs de Lyon (1977) (I978), I87.) Not everyone from a Greek background was so hampered by the difficulty of learning Latin, which Gregorius goes on to admit. About 40 per cent of the text of the Digest, some 300,000 words, is the work of Domitius Ulpianus from Tyre, a Hellenized Phoenician city which was to become a Roman colonia only in the course of his lifetime (PCPS ccIx (1983), 55). Whether Ulpian was the descendant of Italian immigrants, or perhaps of a family which had gained the citizenship from Domitius Corbulo, he unmistakably identified himself with the long history of his patria (Dig. L, I5, I pr.). But he also saw his own avocation as a legal writer not only, like all the other jurists, as the product of a chain of tradition stretching back to the later Republic, but also as a pre-eminent form of philosophia (Dig. I, I, I, I):