Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

244 9. roman law
also enacted that judges must disregard imperial rescripts or mandates
which encroached on their jurisdiction, whether adduced by imperial referendarii
in writing or by word of mouth. This law included all private
rescripts, pragmatic sanctions, official rescripts and imperial instructions to
public servants (mandata) and applied whether they had been obtained
before or during the case. Further, the law was to be recited at the start of
the record of every case. 21
Hardly any records of law making by magistrates below the emperor
have survived – essentially only a collection of abbreviated edicts emanating
from the praetorian prefect of the east between 490 and 563 in Greek. 22
Three of these, in part preserved unabbreviated, were appended to the
comprehensive collection of Justinianic Novels. 23 Documents relating to
private transactions survive in large numbers. Of those in Latin the most
important are the papyri from Ravenna dating from the fifth century. 24
Copious Greek papyri come from sixth-century Egypt.
iv. codification
In 429 Theodosius II decided to have all imperial constitutions since
Constantine brought into an official order on the model of the private collections
made under Diocletian, the Codex Gregorianus and Codex
Hermogenianus. 25 The flood of imperial pronouncements had become so
great that no professional lawyer could pretend to master them all. 26 The
first phase of the project was to be the collection of all constitutions since
Constantine which had general validity: the resolutions of the senate (in
reality, imperial communications to the senate), imperial edicts and other
leges generales even where applicable only in particular regions. All were to be
shorn of their legally superfluous outworks, especially the high-flown rhetorical
introductions, distributed under titles according to subject matter
and, within those titles, set out in chronological order. The resulting collection
was intended to be no more than the foundation for a more far-reaching
project: there was to be a volume of all contemporarily valid legal
materials, purged of all that was obsolete, ambiguous or contradictory. This
definitive work was to be assembled from what would, with the new addition,
be the three extant collections of constitutions and from the private
juristic literature. According to the plan, it was this work which was to bear
the emperor’s name.
However, the larger ambitions were not destined to be realized. After
nearly seven years’ work assembling the constitutions, the emperor ordered
21 Just. Nov. 82.13 (a.d. 539); 113 (541), now confined to encroachments contrary to the law.
22 Ed. by Zachariae von Lingenthal (1843b). 23 Just. Nov. 166–8. 24 Tjäder (1955–82).
25 C.Th. i.1.5; Albanese (1991a); Falchi (1989) 13–17; Honoré (1998).
26 Nov. Theod. 1.1; cf. Anon. De reb. bell. 21, with Brandt (1988) 125ff.
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