c. 161 CE · Early law

Institutes of Gaius

Rome

A short textbook of Roman law for students, arranged under persons, things and actions.

Why it matters

Justinian's own Institutes were built on it, and its three-part scheme of persons, things and actions still shapes the structure of civil codes. The text was lost, and rediscovered in a Verona manuscript in 1816.

Built on

c. 450 BCE

The Twelve Tables

Rome

systematised the older rules of Roman civil law

Went on to shape

529 to 534

Corpus Juris Civilis (Justinian's Code)

Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire

the Institutes part was based on Gaius's textbook

Counting texts that borrowed from the texts that borrowed from this one, 40 later texts on this timeline trace back to it.

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TheLawToKnow Tools’s timeline lists links of influence only where the borrowing is widely documented. Historians sometimes disagree about how much one text shaped another. It is an educational overview, not legal advice.