Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

sources 165
i. sources
The range of different types of source for government and administration
in the fifth to sixth centuries is extensive, and these can be exploited to yield
a wide range of conclusions (often, though, highly conjectural) on the
structures and methods of government, on its personnel, and on their
values and attitudes. The sources, however, are also tantalizingly patchy, too
often restricted to narrow areas of space and time. The range indicates the
pervasiveness of government, at least at literate levels of society, and the
role of emperors and their administration in defining social and economic
structures and ways of thought; the restrictions indicate the infrequency of
major change – people take special notice of institutions when they are in
peril.
The men who tell us most about the system are those who sat at its centre,
the emperors. Their laws, however, express not only the imperial will, but the
wishes both of the ministers who will in most cases have influenced, or
determined, the drafting of laws, and of other ministers and subjects whose
complaints, reports and recommendations evoked them, and without whose
active and passive co-operation the system could not work. When, in 438, the
emperor Theodosius II published the sixteen books of his Code, compiling
legislation from the time of Constantine onwards, four books were devoted
to laws concerning civil and military administrative duties, privileges and
precedence, four to taxation and the imperial fisc, and another to the administration
of Rome and Constantinople. 3 Of the Code of Justinian (529,
revised in 534) which superseded it, three out of twelve books are largely
devoted to these themes. In addition, we have a number of imperial laws
(Novels) published after the Codes, especially from Justinian, which also
handle administrative matters. Setting aside the content of individual laws,
this legislation tells us much about the interrelations of politics and government.
The Theodosian Code was compiled by a bureaucracy which had been
firmly established at Constantinople for a generation, and seems modestly
professional in its approach to the problems of running systems of government
and law that had both grown up haphazardly over centuries: indeed,
one aspect of this professionalism is the very process of identification and
collection of laws from provincial archives, in order to provide information
that had not been preserved at Constantinople in the period before it became
the settled capital of the eastern empire. The authorities were tidiers, rather
than innovators; it is notable that the volume of legislation included diminishes
markedly in the early fifth century.
The Code also, however, reflects insecurity: the fact that the control of the
Theodosian dynasty over the western parts of the empire was dwindling,
3 In general on the Theodosian Code, see the papers in Harries and Wood (1993).
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