Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/178

 authorities. Justinian felt that the law should be standard- ized, that one correct and official version of it should be published.

We have seen that the Theodosian Code of 438 brought together and abridged under various headings merely the Code of legislation of the emperors since Constantine, Justinian t h at some of the laws ordered what others for- bade, and that one cannot tell from the Code which were enforced and which were dead-letters. There were similar codes of the imperial legislation before Constantine. In 528, the second year of his reign, Justinian appointed a commission of ten to collect all imperial statutes down to his own time, but to leave out repetitions and contradic- tions and to include only laws which were still in force. This piece of work was finished by 529. The next year Tribonian, who had been a member of the previous commission, was given full charge, with professors The Digest and practicing lawyers of his choice, of the more or Pandects difficult task of making a digest of all the writ- ings of Roman jurists. Tribonian estimated that his com- mittee, which worked in three sections, had reduced three million lines of legal literature to about one hundred and fifty thousand. From some writers they made but a single excerpt, while one third of their book is drawn from the writings of Ulpian. Here again anything obsolete or contra- dictory was omitted. The extracts were arranged according to their subject-matter under four hundred and thirty-two titles similar to those in the Code, although a belief in the mystic significance of numbers led to a further division of the work into seven parts of seven books each, and fifty books in all, since there was one introductory book. Hence- forth this work was to be the exclusive authority and no one was to write a commentary on it. Such was the famous Digest or Pandects, completed in 533. It preserved in a practical form enough of the writings of the earlier great jurists to enable later ages to benefit by their thought and to continue to make use of the Roman law. The preparation of the Digest had revealed to Tribonian