| Sumario: | This article examines the historical afterlife of the Perpetual Edict commissioned by the Roman emperor Hadrian during the second century AD. Accounts of the institution by Roman jurists and historians are inconsistent, which has led legal historians to adopt positions of remarkable variation. The relationship between historical sources and interpretations demonstrates that from the sixteenth century onwards contemporary legal ideas of codification of law were transposed into the history of the Perpetual Edict. In particular, the use of the model of a modern systematic codification is explained as an expression of phantom modernity, the tendency of scholars to modernise the classical world as a continuation of the long-established glorification of the Antonine Roman empire.
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