The Emperor’s Lost Dream

Justinian’s legislation found life impossible everywhere. In the East it was in large part extraneous to local customs and even to the ideol­ogy of empire. Never applied, in 740 it was formally replaced by a short collection of precepts (in only 144 chapters), Ecloga ton nomδn, a work published in the context of a clumsy attempt at legislation on the part of Emperor Leo III.

In the West, Justinian’s legislation was equally extraneous to the regna that had been constituted on the ruins of the Roman Empire. It was unknown in the Kingdom of the Visigoths (what is now Spain and part of southern France) in spite of an ephemeral conquest of the eastern portion of the Iberian Peninsula. It was unknown in the Kingdom of the Burgundians, in France under the Salian Franks, and in Germanic lands under the Alemanni and the Bavari.

It arrived in Italy in 554, when the Byzantine armies, after twenty years of devastating batdes, reconquered the Italian Peninsula and united it once more with the Eastern Empire. It was the bishop of Rome, Pope Vigilius, who “supplicated” Justinian to pass a law to put his compilations into force, which he did with the promulgation of the Pragmatica Sanctiopropetitione Vegilii. Very few people in Italy had the time or the opportunity to become acquainted with that de­

volume of the Corpus. The Novellae (the third volume of the Corpus) was edited by Rudolph Scholl and Wilhelm Kroll (Berolini: apud Weidmannos₅1895). These three works, much reprinted, make up a corpus that circulates broadly to this day. TheDigesta is available in English as TheDigest of Justinian, ed. Theodor Mommsen with the aid of Paul Kreuger, trans, and ed. Alan Watson, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Penn­sylvania Press, 1985). cree, however, because, beginning in 568, northern and central Italy were thrown into turmoil by the Lombard invasion and occupation, and because more Greek than Latin was spoken in the regions that remained loyal to Byzantium and connected with it, and the people there viewed with hostility laws deriving from a Rome that they re­membered as a harsh and rapacious capital.

We know that only a very few copies of the Institutwnes continued to be known, occasionally read, and modestly annotated. The Codex was dismembered: the last three books (dealing with the administra­tion of the empire) fell into neglect; the text of the first nine books was abridged into an extremely rare and incomplete Epitome Codicis. TheDigesta and the Novellae were totally lost, save for a few extremely rare fragments of the latter.

Thus in the sixth century, in the very years of its promulgation, the corpus of Justinian’s laws moved into a long night that to some contemporaries must have seemed to herald its death. Today we know that its long night lasted roughly six centuries and that the long wait safeguarded the life of those laws.

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