120 Chapter 7
complete. The voice of the people was normally ex-
pressed by the crowd at the Hippodrome, the great
racetrack that lay next to the imperial palace at the
heart of the city. Chariot racing remained a dominant
passion in Byzantine life, and as many as 100,000 spec-
tators would gather to cheer on the Blues or the
Greens, racing teams that were also political factions.
The possibility of being deposed and blinded by rival
generals, or perhaps dismembered by the mob, pre-
served a measure of imperial accountability. Only about
half of the Byzantine emperors died a natural death in
office.
The Roman legal tradition acted as a further re-
straint on arbitrary behavior. The emperor Justinian,
who came to the throne in A.D. 527 and reigned for
nearly forty years before dying at age eighty-three,
saved the body of Roman law that has reached modern
times. The distillation of Roman law and commentaries
on it, compiled by Justinian and his advisers and collec-
tively known as the Corpus Iuris Civilis(Body of the Civil
Law) were published at Constantinople in A.D. 533.
(see document 7.1). They filled three large volumes
that became one of the most influential law books ever
written. Ironically, the Codex, Digest,and Institutespro-
duced under Justinian may have been more important
in the west than in the east. In the west, Roman law was
largely replaced by Germanic traditions and had to be
revived in the twelfth century, a process that would
have been impossible without accessible texts. In con-
trast, eastern courts maintained Roman law without in-
terruption, modifying it on occasion to reflect Christian
values. Respect for the tradition was universal, andDOCUMENT 7.1
Justinian: Institutes on Justice and the Law
The Institutesis the shortest of the four parts of the Corpus Iuris
Civilis,and it provides a framework for the entire Corpus. The first
section of the first book of the Institutesopens with a preamble on the
nature of justice and law, and the best means of teaching it to students.
The discussion then moves to general categories in the law ranging from
the law of persons to penalties for overeager litigants. The section on
disinheriting children reflects partibility as the basis of inheritance in
Roman law; that is, children must normally inherit equally.
1.1 JUSTICE AND LAW. Justice is an unswerving and
perpetual determination to acknowledge all men’s rights.
- Learning in the law entails knowledge of God and man,
and mastery of the difference between justice and injus-
tice. 2. As we embark on the exposition of Roman law af-
ter these general statements, the best plan will be to give
brief, straightforward accounts of each topics. The denser
detail must be kept till later. Any other approach would
mean making students take in a huge number of distinc-
tions right at the start while their minds were still un-
trained and short of stamina. Half of them would give up.
Or else they would lose their self-confidence—a frequent
source of discouragement for the young—and at the cost
of toil and tears would in the end reach the very standard
they could have attained earlier and without overwork or
self-doubt if they had been taken along an easier road. - The commandments of the law are these: live honor-
ably; harm nobody; give everyone his due.
1.3 THE LAW OF PERSONS. The main classification
in the law of persons is this: all men are either free or
slaves. 1. Liberty—the Latin libertasgive us liberi,free
men—denotes a man’s natural ability to do what he wants
as long as the law or some other force does not prevent
him. 2. Slavery, on the other hand, is an institution of the
law of all peoples; it makes a man the property of another,
contrary to the law of nature.
2.13 DISINHERITING CHILDREN. Someone with a
son within his authority must be sure to appoint him heir
or to disinherit him specifically. If he passes over him in
silence, his will becomes a nullity.... However, the old
rules did not apply with the same rigour to daughters or
to other male or female members of the family de-
scended through the male line. If they were neither ap-
pointed heirs nor disinherited the will was not wholly
invalidated. Instead they had a right to come in for their
proper shares. The head of the family was also not
obliged to disinherit them by name but could do it by a
general clause.
4.16 PENALTIES FOR OVER-EAGER LITIGANTS. We
should notice what pains the guardians of the law have
taken to see that people do not turn lightly to litigation.
This is our concern as well. The main checks on the eager-
ness of plaintiffs and defendants are money penalties, oaths
to bind the conscience, and the fear of disgrace.
Justinian’s Institutes,pp. 37–39, ed. and trans. Peter Birks and Grant
MacLeod. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.