language, while in the extracts of which the Codex is composed
we find valuable historical evidence bearing on the administration
and social condition of the later Pagan and earlier Christian
empire; fourthly, that Justinian’s age, that is to say, the intellect
of the men whose services he commanded, was quite unequal to
so vast an undertaking as the fusing upon scientific principles
into one new organic whole of the entire law of the empire. With
sufficient time and labour the work might no doubt have been
done; but what we possess of Justinian’s own legislation, and
still more what we know of the general condition of literary and
legal capacity in his time, makes it certain that it would not have
been well done, and that the result would have been not more
valuable to the Romans of that age, and much less valuable to
the modern world, than are the results, preserved in the Digest
and the Codex, of what he and Tribonian actually did.
To the merits of the work as actually performed some reference has already been made. The chief defect of the Digest is in point of scientific arrangement, a matter about which the Roman lawyers, perhaps one may say the ancients generally, cared very little. There are some repetitions and some inconsistencies, but not more than may fairly be allowed for in a compilation of such magnitude executed so rapidly. Tribonian has been blamed for the insertions the compilers made in the sentences of the old jurists (the so-called Emblemata Triboniani); but it was a part of Justinian’s plan that such insertions should be made, so as to adapt those sentences to the law as settled in the emperor’s time. On Justinian’s own laws, contained in the Codex and in his Novels, a somewhat less favourable judgment must be pronounced. They, and especially the latter, are diffuse and often lax in expression, needlessly prolix, and pompously rhetorical. The policy of many, particularly of those which deal with ecclesiastical matters, may also be condemned; yet some gratitude is due to the legislator who put the law of intestate succession on that plain and rational footing whereon it has ever since continued to stand. It is somewhat remarkable that, although Justinian is so much more familiar to us by his legislation than by anything else, this sphere of his imperial labour is hardly referred to by any of the contemporary historians, and then only with censure. Procopius complains that he and Tribonian were always repealing old laws and enacting new ones, and accuses them of venal motives for doing so.
The Corpus Juris of Justinian continued to be, with naturally a few additions in the ordinances of succeeding emperors, the chief law-book of the Roman world till the time of the Macedonian dynasty when, towards the end of the 9th century, a new system was prepared and issued by those sovereigns, which we know as the Basilica. It is of course written in Greek, and consists of parts of the substance of the Codex and the Digest, thrown together and often altered in expression, together with some matter from the Novels and imperial ordinances posterior to Justinian. In the western provinces, which had been wholly severed from the empire before the publication of the Basilica, the law as settled by Justinian held its ground; but copies of the Corpus Juris were extremely rare, nor did the study of it revive until the end of the 11th century.
The best edition of the Digest is that of Mommsen (Berlin 1868–1870), and of the Codex that of Krüger (Berlin 1875–1877).
2. In his financial administration of the empire, Justinian is represented to us as being at once rapacious and extravagant. His unwearied activity and inordinate vanity led him to undertake a great many costly public works, many of them, such as the erection of palaces and churches, unremunerative. The money needed for these, for his wars, and for buying off the barbarians who threatened the frontiers, had to be obtained by increasing the burdens of the people. They suffered, not only from the regular taxes, which were seldom remitted even after bad seasons, but also from monopolies; and Procopius goes so far as to allege that the emperor made a practice of further recruiting his treasury by confiscating on slight or fictitious pretexts the property of persons who had displeased Theodora or himself. Fiscal severities were no doubt one cause of the insurrections which now and then broke out, and in the gravest of which, (532) thirty thousand persons are said to have perished in the capital. It is not always easy to discover, putting together the trustworthy evidence of Justinian’s own laws and the angry complaints of Procopius, what was the nature and justification of the changes made in the civil administration. But the general conclusion seems to be that these changes were always in the direction of further centralization, increasing the power of the chief ministers and their offices, bringing all more directly under the control of the Crown, and in some cases limiting the powers and appropriating the funds of local municipalities. Financial necessities compelled retrenchment, so that a certain number of offices were suppressed altogether, much to the disgust of the office-holding class, which was numerous and wealthy, and had almost come to look on the civil service as its hereditary possession. The most remarkable instance of this policy was the discontinuance of the consulship. This great office had remained a dignity centuries after it had ceased to be a power; but it was a very costly dignity, the holder being expected to spend large sums in public displays. As these sums were provided by the state, Justinian saved something considerable by stopping the payment. He named no consul after Basilius, who was the name-giving consul of 541.
In a bureaucratic despotism the greatest merit of a sovereign is to choose capable and honest ministers. Justinian’s selections were usually capable, but not so often honest; probably it was hard to find thoroughly upright officials; possibly they would not have been most serviceable in carrying out the imperial will, and especially in replenishing the imperial treasury. Even the great Tribonian labours under the reproach of corruption, while the fact that Justinian maintained John of Cappadocia in power long after his greed, his unscrupulousness, and the excesses of his private life had excited the anger of the whole empire, reflects little credit on his own principles of government and sense of duty to his subjects. The department of administration in which he seems to have felt most personal interest was that of public works. He spent immense sums on buildings of all sorts, on quays and harbours, on fortifications, repairing the walls of cities and erecting castles in Thrace to check the inroads of the barbarians, on aqueducts, on monasteries, above all, upon churches. Of these works only two remain perfect, St Sophia in Constantinople, now a mosque, and one of the architectural wonders of the world, and the church of SS Sergius and Bacchus, now commonly called Little St Sophia, which stands about half a mile from the great church, and is in its way a very delicate and beautiful piece of work. The church of S. Vitale at Ravenna, though built in Justinian’s reign, and containing mosaic pictures of him and Theodora, does not appear to have owed anything to his mind or purse.
3. Justinian’s ecclesiastical policy was so complex and varying that it is impossible within the limits of this article to do more than indicate its bare outlines. For many years before the accession of his uncle Justin, the Eastern world had been vexed by the struggles of the Monophysite party, who recognized only one nature in Christ, against the view which then and ever since has maintained itself as orthodox, that the divine and human natures coexisted in Him. The latter doctrine had triumphed at the council of Chalcedon, and was held by the whole Western Church, but Egypt, great part of Syria and Asia Minor, and a considerable minority even in Constantinople clung to Monophysitism. The emperors Zeno and Anastasius had been strongly suspected of it, and the Roman bishops had refused to communicate with the patriarchs of Constantinople since 484, when they had condemned Acacius for accepting the formula of conciliation issued by Zeno. One of Justinian’s first public acts was to put an end to this schism by inducing Justin to make the then patriarch renounce this formula and declare his full adhesion to the creed of Chalcedon. When he himself came to the throne he endeavoured to persuade the Monophysites to come in by summoning some of their leaders to a conference. This failing, he ejected suspected prelates, and occasionally persecuted them, though with far less severity than that applied to the heretics of a deeper dye, such as Montanists or even Arians. Not long afterwards, his attention having been called to the spread of Origenistic opinions in Syria, he issued an edict condemning fourteen propositions drawn from the writings of the great Alexandrian,
