Codex Gregorianus

• 1. Introduction

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  The Codex Gregorianus is a collection of imperial Roman laws assembled from more than a century and a half of imperial pronouncements, spanning from the 130s to the 290s AD. Somewhere around 291 to 294, a man named Gregorius gathered rescripts, letters, and edicts issued by Roman emperors and arranged them into a multi-book reference work. Nobody alive then could have guessed that this private legal compilation would shape European law all the way to the Code Napoleon of 1804 and beyond.

  Who was Gregorius? What did his original code actually look like? And how does a work that was deliberately buried by two separate empires in the sixth century still leave its mark on modern law? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Man Called Gregorius

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  Nothing about Gregorius is known for certain beyond his name, which the Codex preserves. Scholars have suggested he served as the magister libellorum, the official drafter of responses to petitions, under the emperors Carinus and Diocletian in the 280s and early 290s. That role would have put him at the heart of imperial correspondence and given him access to an enormous archive of legal texts.

  The Codex he produced was not a simple list. It was organized into thematic headings, called tituli, and within each heading the materials ran in chronological order. The content was a mixture: rescripts sent to private petitioners, letters addressed to officials, and public edicts. Estimates of the original number of books range from 14 to 16, with most scholars settling on 15. One significant clue about how Gregorius worked is that the surviving evidence for original publication points overwhelmingly to the practice of posting up texts publicly, suggesting he drew heavily on material already in the public domain rather than from sealed imperial files.

• 3. A Standard Reference

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  By the fourth and fifth centuries, anyone who needed to cite an imperial constitution turned to the Codex Gregorianus as a matter of course. It was routinely paired with a companion work, the Codex Hermogenianus, as the two go-to references for imperial law.

  The earliest explicit quotations appear in the anonymous Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio, also known as the Lex Dei, probably written in the 390s. Augustine of Hippo cited the Gregorian Code in the early fifth century when writing about adulterous marriages. Then came the most famous endorsement of all. On the 26th of March 429, the emperor Theodosius II addressed the senate of Constantinople with a directive ordering the collection of imperial constitutions since Constantine I into what would become the Codex Theodosianus. That directive, drafted by the imperial quaestor Antiochus Chuzon, cited the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes as the direct model for organizing the new compilation.

  After the Theodosian era, the work continued to circulate. The mid-fifth-century anonymous author of the Consultatio veteris cuiusdam iurisconsulti, probably based in Gaul, quoted both Codes as sources. Users of the Fragmenta Vaticana added marginal cross-references to them. Notes from an eastern law school lecture course on Ulpian's Ad Sabinum show the Code still being read in academic settings.

• 4. Deliberate Eclipse

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  Two major legislative programmes in the sixth century set out, each in its own way, to replace the Codex Gregorianus with something more authoritative and current. The first came from the Visigothic kingdom. In 506, the Breviary of Alaric was promulgated and explicitly superseded the original full text of the Gregorian Code throughout Visigothic Gaul and Spain. What survived in that context was only an abridged version accompanied by clarificatory notes called interpretationes.

  The second, larger eclipse came from Constantinople. As part of the emperor Justinian's grand codification programme, the Gregorian Code formed a major component of the Codex Justinianeus, which came into force in its first edition in AD 529 across the Roman Balkans and eastern provinces. The programme then rolled out to Latin North Africa after its reconquest from the Vandals in 530, and finally to Italy in 554. By the middle of the sixth century, the original Gregorian Code had been displaced across most of the Mediterranean world. The only region where full copies continued to be copied and used was Merovingian and Frankish Gaul, as the appendices to manuscripts of the Breviary confirm, and that exception lasted from the sixth through the ninth centuries.

• 5. A Long Reach

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  It was precisely because Justinian's compilers absorbed so much of it that the Codex Gregorianus left a lasting mark. Incorporated into the Codex Justinianeus, it became part of the Corpus Juris Civilis, which served as the model and inspiration for the revived Roman law tradition of the medieval and early modern periods. That tradition, in turn, supplied the framework for the civil law codes that came to dominate European legal systems, culminating in the Code Napoleon of 1804.

  Scholars have struggled to reconstruct what the original Gregorian Code looked like, partly because of a stubborn problem: in the years of the mid 290s, rescripts attributable to Gregorius and those of Hermogenian overlap in the Codex Justinianeus, making it difficult to assign individual texts with certainty. The fullest edition remains Haenel's 1837 work, which covered only texts explicitly attributed to the Gregorian Code by ancient authorities, leaving aside the implicitly attributed Justinianic material. Krueger in 1890 edited the Visigothic abridgement and reconstructed the code's structure on a broader basis. Tony Honoré in 1994 assembled all the private rescripts of the relevant period in a single chronological sequence. Then, on the 26th of January 2010, Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway at University College London announced the discovery of seventeen fragments believed to be from the original version of the code, opening fresh possibilities for anyone willing to attempt a new reconstruction.