imperial government a new lease of life, and made its character more purely despotic. Therewith came the stopping of the persecution of the Christians, and presently the recognition of their religion as that which the State favoured, and which it before long began to protect and control. The civil power admitted and supported the authority of the bishops, and when doctrinal controversies distracted the Church, the monarchs, beginning from Constantine at the Council of Nicaea, endeavoured to compose the differences of jarring sections.

These changes told upon the law as well as upon institutions. New authorities grew up within the Church, and these authorities, after long struggles, obtained coercive power. Not only was the spirit of legislation in such subjects as slavery and the family alteredmarriage and divorce, for instance, began to be regarded with new eyes-but a fresh field for legislation was opened up in the regulation of various ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical matters, as well as in the encouragement or repression of certain religious opinions. The influence on law of Greek customs, which seemed to have been expunged by the extension of citizenship to all subjects a century before Constantine, makes itself felt in his legislation.

Besides these influences belonging to the sphere of politics and religion, economic causes, less conspicuous, but of grave moment, had also been at work in undermining the social basis of the State and inducing efforts to apply new legislative remedies. Slavery and the decline of agriculture, particularly in the Western half of the Empire, throughout which there seems to have been comparatively little manufacturing industry, had reduced the population and the prosperity of the middle classes, and had exhausted the source whence native armies could be drawn. Thus social conditions were changing. The growth of that species of serfdom which the Romans called colonatus belongs to this period. The financial strain on the government became more severe.

New expedients had to be resorted to. All these phenomena, coupled with the more autocratic character which the central government of the Empire took from Diocletian onwards, induced a greater and sometimes indeed a hasty and feverish exuberance of legislation, which was now effected solely by imperial ordinances.

Industrial decay seems to have been more rapid in Western than in the Eastern provinces, though palpable enough in such regions as Thrace and Greece. But everywhere there was an intellectual decline, which appeared not least in the sinking of the level of juristic ability and learning. The great race of jurists who adorned the first two and a half centuries of the Empire had long died out. We hear of no fertile legal minds, no law books of merit deserving to be remembered, during the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. The mass of law had however increased, and the judges and practising advocates were, except in the larger cities, less than ever capable of dealing with it. The substitution of Roman for provincial law effected by the Edict of the Emperor Antoninus Caracalla had introduced some confusion, especially in the Eastern provinces, where Greek or Oriental customs were deeply rooted, and did not readily give place to Roman rules. The emperors themselves deplore the ignorance of law among practitioners and presently it was found necessary to prescribe an examination for advocates on their admission to the bar. Accordingly the necessity for collecting that which was binding law and for putting it into an accessible form became greater than ever. It had in earlier days been an ideal of perfection cherished by theorists; it was now an urgent practical need. It was not the bloom and splendour but the decadence of legal study and science that ushered in the era of codification. A century after the death of Constantine, the Emperor Theodosius II, grandson of Theodosius the Great, reigning at Constantinople from A.D. 408 to A.D. 450, issued a complete edition of the imperial constitutions in force,

beginning from the time of Constantine, those of earlier Emperors having been already gathered into two collections (compiled by two eminent jurists) in current use. Shortly before a statute had been issued giving full binding authority to all the writings (except the notes of Paul and Ulpian upon Papinian) of five specially famous jurists of the classical age (Papinian, Paul, Gaius, Ulpian, Modestinus). The advisers of Theodosius II had intended to codify the whole law, including the ancient statutes and decrees of the Senate and Edicts of magistrates so far as they remained in force, as well as the writings of the jurists, but the difficulties were too great for them, and they contented themselves with a revised edition of the more recent imperial constitutions.

Justinian was more energetic, and his codification of the whole law of the Empire marks an epoch of supreme importance in the history not merely of Rome but of the civilized world, for it is possible that without it very little of the jurisprudence of antiquity would have been preserved to us, so that the new nations which were destined to emerge from the confusion of the Dark Ages might have lacked the foundation on which they have built up the law of the modern world. It is indeed an epoch which stands alone both in legal and in political history.

Justinian's scheme for arranging and consolidating the law included a compilation of extracts from the writings of the jurists of the first three centuries of the Empire, together with a collection of such and so many of the Constitutions of the Emperors as were to be left in force, both collections being revised so as to bring the contents of each into accord and to harmonize the part of earlier date (viz. that which contained the extracts from the old jurists) with the later law as settled by imperial ordinances. It was completed in the space of six years only-too short a time for so great a work. It was followed by a good deal of fresh legislation, for the Emperor and his legal minister Tribonian, having

had their appetite whetted, desired to amend the law in many further points and reduce it to a greater symmetry of form and perfection of substance. The Emperor moreover desired, for Tribonian was probably something of a Gallio in such matters, to give effect to his religious sentiments both by laying a heavy hand on heretics and by making the law more conformable to Christian ideas. Thus the time of Justinian is almost as significant for the changes made in the substance of the law as for the more compendious and convenient form into which the law was brought.

Some thirty years before the enactment of Justinian's Codex and Digest (which, though intended for the whole Empire, did not come into force in such Western provinces as had already been lost) three collections of law had been made by three barbarian kings for the governance of their Roman subjects. These were the Edictum of Theodorich, King of the East Goths, published in A.D. 500, the Lex Romana Visigothorum, commonly called the Breviarium Alaricianum, published by Alarich II, King of the West Goths (settled in Aquitaine and Spain), in A.D. 506, a year before his overthrow by Clovis, and the Lex Romana Burgundionum, published by the Burgundian King Sigismund in the beginning of the sixth century. These three compilations, each of which consists of a certain number of imperial Constitutions, with extracts from a few jurists, ought to be considered in relation to Justinian's work, partly because each of them did for a part of the Roman West what he did for the East, and, as it turned out, for Italy and Sicily also, when Belisarius reconquered those countries for him, and partly because they were due to the same need for accessible abridgements of the huge mass of confused and scattered law which prompted the action of Justinian himself. They are parts of the same movement, though they have far less importance than Justinian's work, and, unlike his, include little or no new law.

The main cause of the tendency to consolidate the law and make it more accessible was the profusion with which Diocletian and his successors had used their legislative power, flooding the Empire with a mass of ordinances which few persons could procure or master, together with the decline of legal talent and learning, which made judges and advocates unable to comprehend, to appropriate and to apply the philosophical principles and fine distinctions stored up in the treatises of the old jurists. Here, therefore, political and intellectual conditions, conditions rather of decline than of progress, lay at the root of the phenomenon. But in the case of Justinian something must also be credited to the enlightened desire which he, or Tribonian for him, had conceived of removing the complexities, irregularities and discrepancies of the old law, bringing it nearer to what they thought substantial justice, and presenting it in concise and convenient form. Plato desired to see philosophy in the seat of power, and in Justinian philosophic theory had a chance such as it seldom gets of effecting permanently important changes by a few sweeping measures. Yet theory might have failed if it had not been reinforced by the vanity of an autocrat who desired to leave behind him an enduring monument.

This rapid survey has shown us that two forces were always operative on the development of Roman lawinternal political changes and the influence of the surrounding countries. As Rome conquered and Romanized them, they compelled her institutions to transform themselves, and her law to expand. Economic conditions, speculative thought and religion had each and all of them a share in the course which reforms took, yet a subordinate share.