Reference Edition:

FIRA, II, (ed. J. Baviera) 2nd ed., Firenze 1968, 681-710.

The Edictum Theoderici regis is a collection of laws attributed to King Theodoric the Great, sovereign of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy from 493 to 526. The corpus includes laws and regulations concerning both public and criminal procedural law. The editorial history of this collection of legal provisions is undoubtedly unique: the editio princeps was published under the care of the renowned jurist and humanist Pierre Pithou in 1579, based on two manuscripts which then, for unknown reasons, disappeared without a trace. According to his description in the praefatio, they contained a miscellany of late antique texts, and indeed the Edictum is presented within a rich collection of works drawn from Cassiodorus, Ennodius, and Jordanes, alongside many legal texts of various origins.

The Edictum was attributed to the reign of Theodoric because the spirit of the contained laws presupposes adherence to ius publicum and leges Romanae, and especially because the contained norms bound both the Goths and the Romans, in accordance with the political design that Theodoric had attempted to implement during his long reign. At the current state of research, legal historians and scholars of Roman history are not all inclined to accept the attribution of the corpus to the age of Theodoric, and there are various positions: according to the most cautious hypothesis, it would be attributed to the legislative will not of Theodoric the Great, but of Theodoric I, king of the Visigoths (in office from 419 to 451); others are inclined to accept a placement in the very early years of the VIth century; the most extreme hypothesis, argued by some critics, is that the text would be a medieval forgery, if not even by Pithou himself. In the absence of the two manuscripts, the issue does not seem to be able to be definitively resolved; a position more attentive to the stratifications of the text is proposed by Orazio Licandro, who recognizes and identifies, within this collection a series of thematic nuclei attributable to a manual put together by an anonymous jurist of the VIth century; to this text authority was subsequently given by attributing it to Theodoric.

The text was probably the work of an anonymous Roman jurist, since the viewpoint from which the provisions are presented is Roman, dividing between Romans and barbarians (while Theodoric, in Cassiodorus's Variae, is keen to emphasize the distinction between the Goths, now completely civilized, and the barbarians). The silence of the Justinian Pragmatica Sanctio on the Edict - like that of Cassiodorus, Procopius of Caesarea, and the Anonymus Valesianus - has been taken as indirect evidence that it could not have come from the royal chancellery, but was a text for private use; the same thematic disorder that characterizes the succession of laws leads to not considering the text as the result of a central royal authority, since figures like Cassiodorus, Boethius, or Symmachus, deeply knowledgeable in legal matters, would surely have been consulted by the king and would not have allowed the text to be left in this state. The Edictum opens with a brief prologue, consists of 154 capita, and is closed by a short epilogue; it is possible to identify six thematic groups: 1) Judicial law; 2) Offenses against public peace; 3) Offenses against property; 4) Offenses against women and domestic honor; 5) Provisions on wills and donations; 6) Various norms. [D. Di Rienzo]