Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/739

Rh R O M R M 715 the name of ''EiravayujT) rov vb^ov. The Basilica consists of sixty books, subdivided into titles, following generally the plan of the Justinianian Code, but with the whole law on any particular sub- ject arranged consecutively, whether from Digest, Code, or Novels (see BASILICA, vol. iii. p. 419). Leo's son, Constantinus Porphyro- genitus, made an addition to it in the shape of an official com- mentary collected from the writings of the 6th-century jurists, the so-called Hapdypaai r&v iraa.iui>, which is now spoken of as the scholia to the Basilica, and has done good exegetical service for modern civilians. The Basilica retained its statutory authority until the fall of the Byzantine empire in 1453. But long before that it had practically been abandoned ; and not a single complete copy of it exists. Its place was taken by epitomes and compendia, the last being the Ed/3i/3oj of Constantinus Harmenopulus of 1345, "a miserable epitome of the epitomes of epitomes," as Bruns calls it, which survived the vicissitudes of the centuries, and finally received statutory authority in the modern kingdom of Greece in the year 1835, in place of the Basilica, which had been sanctioned thirteen years before, in 1822. jir Their Fate in the West. Before the rise of the Bologna school e in it was to a much greater extent from the Romano-barbarian codes West, than from the books of Justinian that central and western Europe derived their acquaintance with Roman law. Theodoric's Edict can have had little influence after Justinian's recovery of Italy, and the Romano-Burgundian law was no doubt gradually displaced by the Breviary (Lex Rom. Visigothorum) after Burgundy had fallen into the hands of the Franks ; but the Breviary itself found its way in all directions in France and Germany, penetrating even into England, to a great extent through the agency of the church. There must, however, have been other repertories of Roman law in circulation, as witness a testament made in Paris in the end of the 7th century, preserved by Mabillon, in which the testator uses the old formula of ihejus civile, "ita do, ita lego, ita tester, ita vos Quirites testimonium mihi perhibetote," words that are not to be found either in the Visigothic or the Justinianian collections. In his pragmatic sanction of the year 554 Justinian anew accorded his imperial sanction to the jura and leges, i.e., the Digest and Code, which he says he had long before transmitted to Italy, at the same time declaring that his Novels were to be of the same authority there as in the East. Two years after this came Julian's Latin epitome of them, not improbably prepared by command of the emperor himself. That they all came at once to some extent into use is beyond question ; for there is preserved in Marini's collection the testament of one Mannanes, executed at Ravenna in the reign of Justinian's immediate successor Justin II., in which the requirements of both Code and Novels are scrupulously observed. Of other monuments of the same period that prove the currency of the Justinianian law in Italy several are referred to by Savigny in the second volume of his History of the Roman Law in the Middle Ages, among which may be mentioned the Turin gloss of the In- stitutes, which Fitting ascribes to about the year 545, and two little pieces known as the Dictatum de consiliariis and the Collectio de tutoribus, which form an appendix to some manuscripts of Julian's epitome of the Novels, and may possibly have been from his pen. The invasion of the Lombards, the disturbance they caused in Italy for two centuries, and the barrier they formed between it and the rest of Europe militated against the spread of the Justinianian law north- wards ; but it was taught without much interruption in Ravenna, the scat of the exarchs; to which (but this is doubtful) the school (studium] of Rome, revived by Justinian, is said to have been trans- ferred. By the Lombards, as their savagery toned down, the Roman law was so far recognized that they allowed it to be applied to the Romans living within their territory ; and it is said to have even been taught in Pavia, which they had established as their capital. Their overthrow by Charlemagne opened an outlet for it beyond Italy ; and in the 9th century there is evidence that the Justinian- ian books or some of them were already circulating in the hands of the clergy in various parts of Europe. Yet there are very few remains of any literature indicating much acquaintance with them. Almost the only pieces worth mentioning are the so-called Summa Perusina, an abridgment of the first eight books of the Code, ascribed to the 9th century ; "the Quaestiones ac monita, to the Lombardic laws, drawn mostly from the Institutes, but with a few texts from the Digest, the Code, and Julian's Epitome, and supposed to have been written early in the llth century; the Brachylogus, an abbreviated revision of Justinian's Institutes, with references to his other books, which is thought to have been written in France (Orleans?), according to Fitting between 999 and 1002, but accord- ing to other authorities nearer the end of the llth century; and the Petri exceptiones legum Romanarum, a systematic exposition of the law in four books, written in- the south of France early in the latter half of the llth century, and mostly compiled from Justinianian sources. It was in the very end of the llth century or the beginning of The glos- the 12th that at Bologna, and under one Irnerius, who appears not sarists. to have been a professional jurist but originally a teacher of letters, the study of Roman law began somewhat suddenly to attract students from all parts of the world. Through the action of the clergy the only parts of the Justinianian legislation that had hitherto been in ordinary use were the Institutes, the Code, and the Novels. The first, from its elementary character, had naturally commended itself ; the Code, with its opening title on the Trinity and its second on Holy Church, and the Novels, with their abundant legislation on matters ecclesiastical, were in many respects charters of the church's privileges, and were prized accordingly ; but the Digest, as being the work of pagan jurists, had been practically ignored. The Code and the Novels, however, with their modicum of wheat concealed in such a quantity of chaff, offered little attraction to laymen of intelligence ; and, when a copy of a portion of the Digest, with its infinitely purer diction and its clear and incisive reasoning, came into the hands of Irnerius, it must have been for him as a new revelation. The text of it seems to have reached him by in- stalments ; at least this is the only reasonable explanation of its division by the glossarists (as Irnerius and his successors of the Bologna school were called, the name being derived from the glossae, notes marginal and interlinear, with which they furnished it) into three parts, Digcstum Vetus (books 1 to 24, tit. 2), Infortiatum, and Digestum Novum (book 39 to the end), the general idea being that, after first the old and then the new Digest had come to light, the connecting link unexpectedly turned up, and got in conse- quence the somewhat singular name by which it continued to be known for centuries. The whole collection was by the glossarists distributed in five volumes, the fourth containing the first nine books of the Code, and the fifth, called Volumen parvum legum, containing the Institutes, a Latin translation of 134 of the Novels known as the Authenticum, and the last three books of the Code which had been recovered subsequently to the others. With these five volumes, the teaching that accompanied them, and the glossae, summae, casus, brocarda, &c. , with which they were enriched from the rise of the school with Irnerius till its close with Franciscus Accursius in 1260, Roman jurisprudence began a new career, which it would carry us beyond the limits of this article to attempt to trace even in meagrest outline. 1 (J. M*.) ROMAN LITERATURE IT would be impossible within the limits allowed for this article to attempt, even in outline, any history of the course of Roman literature which would include an account, not only of the extant works which it con- tains and of their authors, but also of the principal works and writers known to us from ancient testimony. The mere enumeration of these in chronological order, without some attempt to ascertain their individual features and to estimate their relation to the intellectual movement of their time, could be of no interest or use to any one. All that is possible to accomplish here is to pass in rapid review the first four of the five periods into which Roman literature may most conveniently be divided, to ascertain the chief literary motives and characteristics of each, and to connect these with the works and writers in whom they are most conspicuously displayed. It will be unnecessary to give any biographical account even of the greatest authors or to criticize their works in detail, as these have been sufficiently treated in separate articles of the present work. The object of the following survey will be to obtain some appreciation of the relation in which the 1 The great authority on the matter of this section is still Savigny's Gesch. d. rb'm, Rechts im Mittelalter, 7 vols., 2d. ed., Heidelberg, 1834-51 ; but much additional light has been thrown on it by Merkel, Stintzing, Blume, Fitting, Bruns, Mommsen, Kriiger, Ticker, Rivier, Conrat (Cohn), and others, whose writings, mostly in periodicals, are too numerous to mention. On the early traces of Roman law in England, see Amos, History and Principles of the Civil Law of Rome, London, 1883, p. 443 sq. ; Caillemer, Le Droit Civil dans les pro- vinces Anglo-Normandes, Caen, 1883 ; Scrutton, The Influence of the Roman Law on that of England, Cambridge, 1885.