Two fragments from the Digest, dealing with the union of the qualities of
debtor and creditor in the same person, reveal a confusing textual tradition.
The text of the littera
florentina seems to be inconsistent in both cases. In the
first case, it is patently illogical. In the second case it can be saved only by
sophisticated interpretation.
A comparison with the Greek tradition however
confirms the illogical text of the first and provides a different version of the
second fragments. As a preliminary study of the roman regulation of the institute, this paper aims to provide a brief analysis of the history of the attempts
to reconstructing the texts and of the discussion about how they should had
been originally written. This discussion condenses the historic legal development of the last centuries and is interesting to see how the different arguments
return and re-emerge cyclically in the centuries, but with different methodologies behind. What is supposed to be a better version could be but the result of
a interpretation and on the other hand what seemed confused to the modern
interpreters could probably already seem confused to the Justinian’s compilers.