Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

codification 249
that in the meantime the juristic literature had been reviewed and excerpted
with an eye to saving whatever was still useful, and the excerpts thus
selected had been put together to produce the fifty books of the Digest.The
emperor was fond of the number fifty, which symbolizes perfection in the
Bible and the Early Fathers. 42 The number of books of classical legal
writing still surviving had been 1,508 (Justinian maintains it was nearly
2,000), which suggests that only about a thirtieth of the material was
retained. However, the proportion is nearer a twentieth, since more than
three million lines of text were compressed into fifty books with almost
150,000 lines: 43 the average length of earlier books was 2,100 lines, whereas
the comparable figure for the fifty books of the Digest is 2,800. The figure
for the Codex is much larger, 5,000.
The books of the Digest contain between two and thirty-two titles
(though books 30 to 32 exceptionally constitute only one title between
them). Within the titles, the individual texts (‘fragments’) are for the most
part set out in the order in which the old books were excerpted. In that
exercise the work had been divided into four separate assignments, the socalled
‘masses’, whose contributions follow each other but not always in the
same order. The masses are the Sabinian, named after the commentaries on
Masurius Sabinus’ ius civile; the edictal, named from the commentaries ad
edictum; the Papinian, dominated by the writings of that jurist; and the
appendix, a small additional group brought in after the beginning of the
work, evidently because they were only acquired after the operation had
begun. Every fragment retained in the Digest is preceded by an ‘inscription’
which sets out its provenance – the author, the work and the number of the
book from which it was taken. However, where excerpts were taken from
one book they are put together as a single fragment. Many fragments run
to several pages, some to only a few words. The longer ones were divided
into paragraphs, something which had already proved necessary in a few
cases in the Codex.
The overall order is roughly the same as that of the Codex, although in
many cases the different structure of the books which were excerpted was
followed. Ecclesiastical law was of course not present in the materials.
Private law and civil procedure filled books 2 to 47, eleven-twelfths of the
whole. This compares with a quarter in the Codex Theodosianus and a good
half in the Justinianus. There was minimal interference with the individual
fragments. Changes chiefly took the form of abbreviation, even within passages
selected for retention, especially if a path had to be cut through
conflicting opinions. In addition, in order to adjust them to fit developments
which had taken place in the law, the texts were modernized by
42 Knütel (1996) 427–8; Scheltema (1975) 233; Schminck (1989) 81.
43 CJ i.17.2.1 (�Digest Const. Tanta 1).
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