Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

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EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 171

tinued to be a massively authoritative presence, symbolic of Christian Roman
imperium in its absolute God- given form.^35 But for just that reason it was li-
able to be subtly perverted in daily use, because unable to renew itself through
debate and exegesis.^36 Though based on Justinian’s Corpus, Leo III’s Ecloga of
741 shows significant divergences from a work that it claims has become “un-
intelligible”—as any learned tradition does unless recast in current idiom.
One notices both specific changes, for example in marital and penal law, such
as the introduction (in the latter sphere) of bodily mutilation;^37 and more
general evolutions, such as the notion that law comes direct from God, no
longer from the emperor as lex animata.^38 The Basilics, compiled c. 900, gave
the Corpus new life by purging the older Greek translations of their freight of
Latinisms, and imposing a more thematic structure.^39 Later, the status of the
Corpus again became controversial, hence a mid- eleventh- century writer’s
pointed preference for the original Justinianic sources over the Basilics.^40
The new millennium signals no fresh developments or particular matura-
tion in Roman law in the Greek East. In the Latin world, the story was differ-
ent. Here, law was the fifth- and sixth- century Germanic successor kingdoms’
principal borrowing from and link with Romanitas, though applied primar-
ily to Roman subject peoples and perhaps more readily available in the Medi-
terranean lands of the Burgundians and Visigoths than in the North. The
Gregorian, Hermogenian, and Theodosian codes were all known and used,
for example in the Breviary of Alaric (Lex Romana Visigothorum) of 506.
Law teaching continued in towns such as Narbonne and Lyons into the sixth
c entur y.^41 Gregory of Tours preserves a piquant tale about one Andarchius, a
slave to a senator named Felix.


He joined in the literary studies of Felix [apparently at Marseille] and
distinguished himself by his learning. He became extremely well in-
formed about the works of Virgil, the books of the Theodosian laws
and the study of arithmetic.^42

35 Haldon, Byzantium in the seventh century [6:34] 258–61.
36 B. Stolte, “Is Byzantine law Roman law ?,” Acta Byzantina Fennica 2 (2003–4) 122–26;
Wieacker, Römische Rechtsgeschichte [6:10] 2.328.
37 Haldon, Byzantium in the seventh century [6:34] 85–86, 257, 262, 266–67.
38 Lokin, in Laiou and Simon (eds), Law and society [6:32] 76–80.
39 M. T. Fögen, “Reanimation of Roman law in the ninth century,” in L. Brubaker (ed.), Byzantium
in the ninth century (Aldershot 1998) 11–22.
40 Essay on bare contracts (Meditatio de nudis pactis) [ed. H. Monnier, Études de droit byzantin
(London 1974) III.28–64] 6.25–27.
41 D. Liebs, “Roman law,” CAH 14.254–56; T. M. Charles- Edwards, “Law in the Western king-
doms between the fifth and the seventh century,” CAH 14.274, 277, 282–87; S. Lafferty, “Law and society
in Ostrogothic Italy,” JLA 3 (2010) 337–64.
42 Gregory of Tours, History [ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison (Hanover 1965^2 ); tr. L. Thorpe (Har-
mondsworth 1974)] 4.46 (tr. emended).

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