The purpose of this book is twofold. On one hand it intends to provide a survey and analysis of the colonate in the Roman Empire from the legal point of view, embedded as much as necessary in the social and economic context of Roman society. On the other hand, it is meant to show how to approach the sources in a case like this and, in general, how to work with the codes of Theodosius and Justinian, in a way that does justice to the place of the texts in the whole of these codifications, that is, taking account of their function within a codification. The individual texts have their value as historical sources, yet one must be aware how they have come to us, in which context and to which purpose they were selected and edited, or else their historical value might diminish or even disappear.

Roman law persists after the fall of Rome, not only governing private/business-relations, but also as the basis for the Western European legal order. When it comes down to the law the Roman Empire lived on as a virtual empire (of the imagination) more than a millennium after the actual fall of the physical empire in the West. Roman law was studied, codified and used as if the Empire was still there.