Arab scholars and scientists, but for the Romans, they were a source of
superstitious horror.
When the Romans conquered a province, they tended to leave local laws
and customs more or less intact. Roman law applied to soldiers and Roman
citizens in that province, but not necessarily to the natives. However, over
time, and with the extension of citizen rights to more and more people, Roman
law became thede factonorm, especially afterAD212 when most free people
in the empire were given citizenship status. The laws changed again late in the
Roman period when Christianity became the official religion, but the collapse
of the Western Empire left much of Europe to go its own way, create its own
forms of government, and its own laws and codes of punishment. Roman law
survived in the Eastern Empire, and inAD534 the emperor Justinian published
a final Roman law code, which offered a clarification and modernisation of
the many laws passed since the original Twelve Tables. Justinian’s Code held
good for most of the next millennium, until the Eastern Empire finally fell to
the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and formed the basis for the canon law of the
Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Renaissance scholars
rediscovered the Roman law codes, and they were used in the formation of
later law codes such as the Napoleonic Code and the laws of the emerging
state of Germany, and influenced the codes of a number of other countries
even later, including Japan and the United States.
CLASSICAL CRIMES