Peter Toohey, a professor from the University of Calgary, shed light on a topic that most of us had never thought about before; disability in the Roman Digest. Throughout his presentation, he stressed that ancient Rome was an oral culture, meaning a handshake was worthless when it came to the law. Verbal contracts were the key in the judicial system back then, which has clearly changed significantly. The definition of the term 'disability' does not cover solely physicalities, but also mentalities like madness that could be an issue when it came to dealing with the law. The Digest was produced at the orders of Justinian circa 530 CE and contains fifty volumes of Roman laws and descriptions of past cases. The main people that this is set to help are women, disabled people, and people who are out of their minds. A surprising fact from the talk was that the most common disability was madness. These people listed before, because of what they were going through, were allowed by the proconsul to use the console in their favour. Unfortunately, like any system of the law, flaws arose quite quickly; d...
