318 The Eastern Empire. R O 
variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand 
volumes, which no fortune could purchase and no capacity 
could digest. Books could not easily be found; and the 
judges, poor in the midst of riches, were reduced to the 
exercise of their illiterate discretion. The subjects of the 
Greek provinces were ignorant of the language that disposed 
of their lives and properties; and the barbarous dialect of the 
Latins was imperfectly studied in the academies of Berytus 
and Constantinople. As an Illyrian soldier, that idiom was 
familiar to the infancy of Justinian; his youth had been 
instructed by the lessons of jurisprudence, and his Imperial 
choice selected the most learned civilians of the East, to 
labour with their sovereign in the work of reformation. The 
theory of professors was assisted by the practice of advocates, 
and the experience of magistrates; and the whole undertaking 
was animated by the spirit of Tribonian. This extraordinary 
man, the object of so much praise and censure, was a native 
of Side, in Pamphylia; and his genius, like that of Bacon, 
embraced, as his own, all the business and knowledge of the 
age. Tribonian composed, both in prose and verse, on a 
strange diversity of curious and abstruse subjects : a double 
panegyric of Justinian, and the life of the philosopher 
Theodotus; the nature of happiness, and the duties of govern¬ 
ment; Homer’s catalogue, and the four-and-twenty sorts of 
metre ; the astronomical canon of Ptolemy; the changes of 
the months; the houses of the planets; and the harmonic 
system of the world. To the literature of Greece he added 
the use of the Latin tongue; the Roman civilians were 
deposited in his library and in his mind; and he most 
assiduously cultivated those arts which opened the road of 
wealth and preferment. From the bar of the praetorian 
praefects, he raised himself to the honours of quaestor, of consul, 
and of master of the offices: the council of Justinian listened 
to his eloquence and wisdom, and envy was mitigated by the 
gentleness and affability of his manners. The reproaches of 
impiety and avarice have stained the virtues or the reputation 
of Tribonian. In a bigotted and persecuting court, the 
principal minister was accused of a secret aversion to the 
Christian faith, and was supposed to entertain the sentiments 
of an Atheist and a Pagan, which have been imputed, 
inconsistently enough, to the last philosophers of Greece. 
His avarice was more clearly proved and more sensibly felt. 
If he were swayed by gifts in the administration of justice, 
the example of Bacon will again occur; nor can the merit of 
Tribonian atone for his baseness, if he degraded the sanctity 
of his profession ; and if laws were every day enacted, modi¬ 
fied, or repealed, for the base consideration of his private 
emolument. In the sedition of Constantinople, his removal 
was granted to the clamours, perhaps to the just indignation, 
of the people; but the quaestor was speedily restored, and 
till the hour of his death, he possessed, above twenty years, 
the favour and confidence of the emperor. His passive and 
dutiful submission has been honoured with the praise of 
Justinian himself, whose vanity was incapable of discerning 
how often that submission degenerated into the grossest 
adulation. Tribonian adored the virtues of his gracious 
master: the earth was unworthy of such a prince; and he 
affected a pious fear, that Justinian, like Elijah or Romulus, 
would be snatched into the air, and translated alive to the 
mansions of caelestial glory. 
If Caesar had achieved the reformation of the Roman 
law, his creative genius, enlightened by reflection and study, 
would have given to the world a pure and original system of 
jurisprudence. Whatever flattery might suggest, the em¬ 
peror of the east was afraid to establish his private judg¬ 
ment as the standard of equity; in the possession of legislative 
power, he borrowed the aid of time and opinion; and his 
laborious compilations are guarded by the sages and legis¬ 
lators of past times. Instead of a statue cast in a simple 
mould by the hand of an artist, the works of Justinian 
represent a tesselated pavement of antiquity, costly, but 
too often of incoherent fragments. In the first year of his 
reign, he directed the faithful Tribonian, and nine learned 
associates, to revise the ordinances of his predecessors, as 
they were contained, since the time of Adrian, in the Gre- 
M E. The Eastern Empire. 
gorian, Hermogenian, and Theodosian codes; to purge the 
errors and contradictions, to retrench whatever was obsolete 
or superfluous, and to select the wise and salutary laws best 
adapted to the practice of the tribunals and the use of his 
subjects. The work was accomplished in fourteen months 
and the twelve books or tables, which the hew decemvirs pro¬ 
duced, might be designed to imitate the labours of their 
Roman predecessors. The new code of Justinian was 
honoured with his name, and confirmed by his royal signa¬ 
ture: authentic transcripts were multiplied by the pens of 
notaries and scribes; they were transmitted to the magis¬ 
trates of the European, the Asiatic, and afterwards the 
African provinces: and the law of the empire was proclaimed 
on solemn festivals at the doors of churches. A more arduous 
operation was still behind : to extract the spirit of jurispru¬ 
dence from the decisions and conjectures, the questions and 
disputes, of the Roman civilians. Seventeen lawyers, with 
Tribonian at their head, were appointed by the emperor to 
exercise an absolute jurisdiction over the works of their pre¬ 
decessors. If they had obeyed his commands in ten ypars, 
Justinian would have been satisfied with their diligence; and 
the rapid composition of the digest of pandects, in 
three years, will deserve praise or censure, according to the 
merit of the execution. From the library of Tribonian, they 
chose forty, the most eminent civilians of former times: two 
thousand treatises were comprised in an abridgment of fifty 
books ; and it has been carefully recorded, that three millions 
of lines or sentences were reduced, in this abstract, to 
the moderate number of one hundred and fifty thousand. 
The edition of this great work was delayed a month after 
that of the institutes ; and it seemed reasonable that the 
elements should precede the digest of the Roman law. As 
soon as the emperor had approved their labours, he ratified, 
by his legislative power, the speculations of these private 
citizens: their commentaries on the twelve tables, the per¬ 
petual edict, the laws of the people, and the decrees of the 
senate, succeeded to the authority of the text; and the text 
was abandoned, as an useless, though venerable, relic of 
antiquity. The Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes, 
were declared to be the legitimate system of civil juris¬ 
prudence ; they alone were admitted in the tribunals, and 
they alone were taught in the academies of Rome, Con¬ 
stantinople, and Berytus. Justinian addressed to the 
senate and provinces, his eternal oracles; and his pride, 
under the mask of piety, ascribed the consummation of 
this great design to the support and inspiration of the 
Deity. 
Since the emperor declined the fame and envy of original 
composition, we can only require at his hands, method, 
choice, and fidelity, the humble, though indispensable, vir¬ 
tues of a compiler. Among the various combinations of 
ideas, it is difficult to assign any reasonable preference; but 
as the order of Justinian is different in his three works, it is 
possible that all may be wrong; and it is certain that two 
cannot be right. In the selection of ancient laws, he seems 
to have viewed his predecessors without jealousy, and with 
equal regard : the series could not ascend above the reign 
of Hadrian, and the narrow distinction of Paganism and 
Christianity, introduced by the superstition of Theodosius, 
had been abolished by the consent of mankind. But the 
jurisprudence of the Pandects is circumscribed within a period 
of an hundred years, from the perpetual edict to the death 
of Severus Alexander: the civilians who lived under the first 
Ceesars, are seldom permitted to speak, and only three names 
can be attributed to the age of the republic. The favourite 
of Justinian (it has been fiercely urged) was fearful of en¬ 
countering the light of freedom and the gravity of Roman 
sages. Tribonian condemned to oblivion the genuine and 
native wisdom of Cato, the Scaevolas, and Sulpicius; while 
he invoked spirits more congenial to his own, the Syrians, 
Greeks, and Africans, who flocked to the Imperial court to 
study Latin as a foreign tongue, and jurisprudence as a.lu- 
crative profession. But the ministers of Justinian were in¬ 
structed to labour, not for the curiosity of antiquarians, but 
for the immediate benefit of his subjects. It was their duty 
to 
