Corpus Juris Civilis
composition: secureauthorship: secure
witness: Florentine Digest manuscript, sixth or seventh century
A single imperial commission compresses a thousand years of Roman juristic opinion into an authoritative body, declares everything left out to be without force, and forbids commentary on the result.
- compilation as a form of legislation, with everything omitted repealed
- excerpting the jurists rather than summarising them, preserving their names
- a prohibition on commentary, to stop the growth it was meant to cure
- the distinction of persons, things and actions as a teaching structure
Justinian ordered the whole inherited mass of Roman law reduced to usable form. The Codex gathered imperial constitutions; the Digest excerpted the classical jurists into fifty books, cutting an estimated ninety-five per cent of what its compilers read; the Institutes served as a student textbook; and the Novellae added Justinian's own later legislation, mostly in Greek. The prefaces are explicit that contradiction and bulk had made the law unknowable, and that the remedy was to fix a text and prohibit the commentaries that had caused the problem. As living administration it lapsed with the western reconquest, but the Digest resurfaced in eleventh-century Italy and became the foundation of European legal science.
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