Tony Honoré, JUSTINIAN'S DIGEST: CHARACTER AND COMPILATION Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2010. viii + 237 pp. ISBN 9780199593309. £50.
| Author | Tammo Wallinga |
| Pages | 119-122 |
| Published date | 01 January 2012 |
| Date | 01 January 2012 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2012.0086 |
Starting with an article (written jointly with the late Alan Rodger) in 1970, Tony Honoré has tried to develop Bluhme's
It must be said that there is merit in Honoré’s attempt to go on where Bluhme and Krüger left off, and he must take credit for starting a discussion that may eventually lead to interesting and useful conclusions. There is still a lot to be discovered about how the compilation process actually worked. Honoré’s results, however, are not particularly reliable and certainly do not constitute a final answer to the questions that he raises. This is largely due to the lack of a consistent and correct method, to a tendency to get carried away by one plausible hypothesis, and to an over-emphasis on numbers as opposed to content.
The first two points of criticism are related. If we resist the temptation of being swept away by Honoré’s maelstrom of calculations, we shall see that they follow a number of assumptions that constitute a plausible and possible, yet unproven hypothesis. Given the fact that the works of the classical jurists from which the Digest was compiled were read in three Masses (as established by Bluhme), Honoré assumes that each Mass was read by two commissioners, out of the seventeen that were available. Apart from Tribonian, there were three other government officials, two professors, and eleven lawyers. Honoré takes it for granted that the role of the lawyers was essentially subordinate and that the other six were the ones who were mainly responsible for the initial excerpting of the classical works and the eventual compilation of the Digest. He assumes that there was a strict schedule in place to ensure speedy excerpting, and a set rate of 5% of its length to which every work must be reduced. He considers it essential (e.g. at 20) that all three sub-committees finished at the same time, in order to start on the compilation of the Digest together. This initial hypothesis is then further illustrated and strengthened with a lot of number-crunching, referring to the division of the works of the classical jurists between the committee members to...
To continue reading
Request your trial