Such growth meant that central government could know local affairs, and thus meddle in them, with much greater accuracy and timeliness than ever before. It was possible for the first time not only to imagine but to achieve a consistency of legal authority and practice that had so far eluded every western state. (China’s story has parallels to Rome’s, and in 587 CE we first hear of the so-called civil service examination system that produced centuries of text-mastering bureaucrats for a long series of imperial dynasties.)
Ambitious attempts at codifying the existing laws
Under the newly intrusive, managerial empire, there had been ambitious attempts at codifying the existing laws. By the early fourth century, two individual jurists, Gregorius and Hermogenes, had put together immense books in the newfangled codex format that Christians favored (bound pages, not an unrolling scroll), in which they gathered what they could find of Roman law and arranged it by topic. The resultant books were expensive and difficult to obtain and copy correctly, but they were as popular among the legally aware as one could imagine. They were reference books, however, not authoritative publications. The imperfections of those codes sharply limited their ability to transform practice, until finally in 438 an emperor, Theodosius II, created the law book that bears his name: the Theodosian Code.
Modest in ambition, it collected and arranged known imperial laws in something like a logical and useful order. The laws in this code preserve for the most part the signs of their creation—often the exact date of promulgation, often enough the place where the particular copy incorporated in the code was published, and enough of the original details of composition to make many of them valuable historical sources for the events of the fourth century and early fifth century.15 The Theodosian Code was less successful in doing the intellectual work of rationalization. There are exceptions, but far too often, if two different emperors said conflicting things about the same subject, their edicts still find themselves side by side in the law book stoletov bulgaria tours.
Justinian had grander dreams. He took the project of codification to a logically higher level and produced three mighty works of law whose usefulness remains to this day. If we praise his achievement, we must remember that it also meant a relocation of authority—away from men and into texts, away from the place where people quarreled with each other and off to the emperor in his court, all mediated by lawyers.
The most famous of codifiers, Tribonian the quaestor, rightly deserves to have his name enshrined in the histories of law. In the 530s, just a few years after Justinian’s accession, Tribonian and his colleagues succeeded not only in bringing together the texts of Roman law in greater completeness and accuracy than ever before, but also in doing the hard work of making useful sense out of them.
Novellae constitutiones
The first step was compiling the Code of Justinian. Carried out on an unprecedentedly ambitious scale, this collection and arrangement of the laws stripped away a certain amount of the original context of dates and addressees, making itself more timeless, less historically rich, than the Theodosian Code. Tribonian paid more attention to the completeness, consistency, and accuracy of his collection than had ever been possible before. Supplemented on a regular basis, for as long as the initiative of Justinian retained its force in the sixth century, by the Novellae constitutiones (“New Constitutions,” usually called, misleadingly in English, the Novels) of Justinian and his immediate successors, this enterprise presented the sum of Roman law. Its reproduction in official copies sent to the main cities of the empire made law more transparent and effective than ever before—and thus strengthened the hand of central authority Evidently ambitious Justinian.
To the code, or Codex, already finished in 529, Justinian’s men added essential further tools. They made a synthetic interpretation and summary of all the individual laws in the codes in the form of a work called the Digest. This was the most ambitious and extensive direct statement of the content of Roman law ever produced. Ostensibly only a restatement and summary, the Digest, like the Codex, effectively imposed a more centralized, standardized, and inflexible rule of law by virtue of clarity, simplicity, and organized coherence. It was finally possible—and therefore it became necessary—to look in one place to find the direct, authoritative statement of the principles and details of Roman law.
