# Mommsen’s Digest edition prints rescripts attributed to Marcus on slaves and cruelty

Date: 1870

## The fact

The 1870 Mommsen Digest, reproducing Justinian’s 6th-century compilation, prints rescripts in Marcus’s name limiting some cruelties to slaves and regulating manumission and burial clubs. The dated public instrument is that critical edition. Conventional rescript dates are not fake ISO days in this field.

## Context

A rescript can soften a slave system without ending it. Improving relative to whim is not abolition. Confidence is medium because compilation is late.

[Marcus Aurelius](/people/marcus-aurelius) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official museum/encyclopedia/agency pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Roman law texts including Digest extracts — Grenoble (https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/; Université Grenoble Alpes / Droit romain).

## Significance

A Digest title is not a 19th-century emancipation.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is [protection-of-minority-rights](/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights). The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Marcus Aurelius: https://factrail.ai/people/marcus-aurelius

## Drivers

- Protection of Minority Rights: https://factrail.ai/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights

## Sources

- https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108939928
- https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/ma-digest-slave-rescripts