Justinian's Digest: Character and Compilation by Tony Honoré
| Published date | 01 May 2011 |
| Author | Andrew Lewis |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2011.856-1.x |
| Date | 01 May 2011 |
REVIEWS
To n y H o n o re Ł,Justinian’s Digest: Character and Compilation,Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010, 238 pp, hb d50.00.
Modern legal systems in the West, together with many beyond that geographical
and cultural boundary, are literally inconceivable without the heritage of Roman
law. Inconceivable precisely because the basic concepts with which we habitually
analyse legal systems, Property, Obligations, Contract, Delict, Persons, Procedure,
are all derived from the system of lawdeveloped by the Romans in the millennium
around the turn of the eras. Further elaborations, like the classi¢cation of servitudes,
rights over another’s property (Donellus’s iura in re aliena) whilst not themselves
Roman, demonstrate through their Latin expression the continuity of the Roman
law tradition.Yet others, like Restitution, can be shown to have deep Roman ideo-
logical roots. If we had not been able to borrow the Romans’i nsights we should have
been able to develop others ofour own but this possibility should not minimis e the
importance of what the Romans’ law has done for us.
Knowledge of Roman law was preserved and transmitted to medieval Europe in
the form of the codi¢cation undertaken by the emperorJustin ian in Constantinople
around the year 530 AD. Principal among these codi¢ed texts was the encyclopaedic
collection of Roman law writings known as the Digest. Comprising extracts from
the expository works of Roman jurists writing between the ¢rst and third centuries
AD, the Digest presents a lively and rich i nsight into the living world of Roman law
in practice in its hey-day. Standing head and shoulders above his fellow jurists is
Ulpian (ca 170 -223 AD), extracts from whose writings comprise some 40 per cent
of the total of the Digest, and about whom Honore
Łhas published a juristic biogra-
phy, Ulpian, Pioneer of Human Rights (2002).
Given its importance in the history of the preservation and transmission of
knowledge about Roman law there remained for long a mystery about how the
task of assembling and editing the text of the Digest was accomplished. The
Digest is itself awork on a considerable scale, running to around 1,500 pages of
close type in modern editions. Justinian himself tells us (C. Ta nta 1) that those
whom he commissioned to undertake the work read some 2,000 books.
Although a Roman book is closer in size to a modern chapter and Justinian
slightly exaggerated the total, Honore
Łcalculates that to produce the Digest, its
compilersread some 2 1/2 million lines or 40,000 pages of writingsby the Roman
jurists.
We learn the o⁄cial versionof the story from the constitutionsby which Jus-
tinian commissioned and introduced the ¢nal publication of the Digest, known
from their opening words as the constitutiones Deo Auctore, Omnem and Ta n t a (of
which there is a parallel Greek version Dedo
Œken). Beyond the size of the task we
are told the names of the chiefcommissioners led byJustinian’s minister of justice
r2011The Authors.The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law Review Limited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2011) 74(3) 479^501
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