WHERE ARE THESE DOCUMENTS FROM?

The bulk of the documents presented here come from a single source, and so they can provide a certain amount of context for each other. They are written on a series of wax-covered tablets excavated at Muricine near ancient Pompeii (itself near modern Naples, but buried by a volcanic eruption in ad 79). Most of them involve the business affairs of a family called the Sulpicii. This gives them their (Latin) name, “Tabulae Pompeianae Sulpiciorum,” and the abbreviation commonly used to identify them – TPSulp. They date from the early to mid first century ad (as you will see, many of the individual documents give dates, sometimes including the year).

The other texts (following those from TPSulp) come from a wide variety of times and places and are recorded in various media: more wax tablets, inscribed marble, inscribed bronze, papyrus. Most of these are identified here by the numbers given them in a standard collection of Roman legal documents (S. Riccobono, Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani [Florence, 1940–3]). The last three come from miscellaneous other sources. All but [26] and parts of [14, 17] (in Greek) were originally written in Latin.

A NOTE ON NAMES

Male Roman citizens had three names, and they normally used all three in formal, legal contexts, like “Gaius Sulpicius Faustus” and “Lucius Faenius Eumenes” in the first document.