(M. O. B. C.)
JUSTIN (Junianus Justinus), Roman historian, probably lived during the age of the Antonines. Of his personal history nothing is known. He is the author of Historiarum Philippicarum libri XLIV., a work described by himself in his preface as a collection of the most important and interesting passages from the voluminous Historiae philippicae et totius mundi origines et terrae situs, written in the time of Augustus by Pompeius Trogus (q.v.). The work of Trogus is lost; but the prologi or arguments of the text are preserved by Pliny and other writers. Although the main theme of Trogus was the rise and history of the Macedonian monarchy, Justin yet permitted himself considerable freedom of digression, and thus produced a capricious anthology instead of a regular epitome of the work. As it stands, however, the history contains much valuable information. The style, though far from perfect, is clear and occasionally elegant. The book was much used in the middle ages, when the author was sometimes confounded with Justin Martyr.
Ed. princeps (1470); J. G. Graevius (1668); J. F. Gronovius (1719); C. H. Frotscher (1827-1830); J. Jeep (1859); F. Rühl (1886, with prologues); see also J. F. Fischer, De elocutione Justini (1868); F. Rühl, Die Verbreitung des J. im Mittelalter (1871); O. Eichert, Wörterbuch zu J. (1881); Köhler and Rühl in Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie, xci., ci., cxxxiii. There are translations in the chief European languages; in English by A. Goldyng (1564); R. Codrington (1682); Brown-Dykes (1712); G. Turnbull (1746); J. Clarke (1790); J. S. Watson (1853).
JUSTINIAN I. (483-565). Flavius Anicius Justinianus, surnamed the Great, the most famous of all the emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire, was by birth a barbarian, native of a place called Tauresium in the district of Dardania, a region of Illyricum,[1] and was born, most probably, on the 11th of May 483. His family has been variously conjectured, on the strength of the proper names which its members are stated to have borne, to have been Teutonic or Slavonic. The latter seems the more probable view. His own name was originally Uprauda.[2] Justinianus was a Roman name which he took from his uncle Justin I., who adopted him, and to whom his advancement in life was due. Of his early life we know nothing except that he went to Constantinople while still a young man, and received there an excellent education. Doubtless he knew Latin before Greek; it is alleged that he always spoke Greek with a barbarian accent. When Justin ascended the throne in 518, Justinian became at once a person of the first consequence, guiding, especially in church matters, the policy of his aged, childless and ignorant uncle, receiving high rank and office at his hands, and soon coming to be regarded as his destined successor. On Justin’s death in 527, having been a few months earlier associated with him as co-emperor, Justinian succeeded without opposition to the throne. About 523 he had married the famous Theodora (q.v.), who, as empress regnant, was closely associated in all his actions till her death in 547.
Justinian’s reign was filled with great events, both at home and abroad, both in peace and in war. They may be classed under four heads: (1) his legal reforms; (2) his administration of the empire; (3) his ecclesiastical policy; and (4) his wars and foreign policy generally.
1. It is as a legislator and codifier of the law that Justinian’s name is most familiar to the modern world; and it is therefore this department of his action that requires to be most fully dealt with here. He found the law of the Roman empire in a state of great confusion. It consisted of two masses, which were usually distinguished as old law (jus vetus) and new law (jus novum). The first of these comprised: (i.) all such of the statutes (leges) passed under the republic and early empire as had not become obsolete; (ii.) the decrees of the senate (senatus consulta) passed at the end of the republic and during the first two centuries of the empire; (iii.) the writings of the jurists of the later republic and of the empire, and more particularly of those jurists to whom the right of declaring the law with authority (jus respondendi) had been committed by the emperors. As these jurists had in their commentaries upon the leges, senatus consulta and edicts of the magistrates practically incorporated all that was of importance in those documents, the books of the jurists may substantially be taken as including (i.) and (ii.). These writings were of course very numerous, and formed a vast mass of literature. Many of them had become exceedingly scarce—many had been altogether lost. Some were of doubtful authenticity. They were so costly that no person of moderate means could hope to possess any large number; even the public libraries had nothing approaching to a complete collection. Moreover, as they proceeded from a large number of independent authors, who wrote expressing their own opinions, they contained many discrepancies and contradictions, the dicta of one writer being controverted by another, while yet both writers might enjoy the same formal authority. A remedy had been attempted to be applied to this evil by a law of the emperors Theodosius II. and Valentinian III., which gave special weight to the writings of five eminent jurists (Papinian, Paulus, Ulpian, Modestinus, Gaius); but it was very far from removing it. As regards the jus vetus, therefore, the judges and practitioners of Justinian’s time had two terrible difficulties to contend with—first, the bulk of the law, which made it impossible for any one to be sure that he possessed anything like the whole of the authorities bearing on the point in question, so that he was always liable to find his opponent quoting against him some authority for which he could not be prepared; and, secondly, the uncertainty of the law, there being a great many important points on which differing opinions of equal legal validity might be cited, so that the practising counsel could not advise, nor the judge decide, with any confidence that he was right, or that a superior court would uphold his view.
The new law (jus novum), which consisted of the ordinances of the emperors promulgated during the middle and later empires (edicta, rescripta, mandata, decreta, usually called by the general name of constitutiones), was in a condition not much better. These ordinances or constitutions were extremely numerous. No complete collection of them existed, for although two collections (Codex gregorianus and Codex hermogenianus) had been made by two jurists in the 4th century, and a large supplementary collection published by the emperor Theodosius II. in 438 (Codex theodosianus), these collections did not include all the constitutions; there were others which it was necessary to obtain separately, but many whereof it must have been impossible for a private person to procure. In this branch too of the law there existed some, though a less formidable, uncertainty; for there were constitutions which practically, if not formally, repealed or superseded others without expressly mentioning them, so that a man who relied on one constitution might find that it had been varied or abrogated by another he had never heard of or on whose sense he had not put such a construction. It was therefore clearly necessary with regard to both the older and the newer law to take some steps to collect into one or more bodies or masses so much of the law as was to be regarded as binding, reducing it within a reasonable compass, and purging away the contradictions or inconsistencies which it contained. The evil had been long felt, and reforms apparently often proposed, but nothing (except by the compilation of the Codex theodosianus) had been done till Justinian’s time. Immediately after his accession, in 528, he appointed a commission to deal with the imperial constitutions (jus novum), this being the easier part of the problem. The commissioners, ten in number, were directed to go through all the constitutions of which copies existed, to select such as were of practical value, to cut these down by retrenching all unnecessary matter, and gather them, arranged in order of date, into one volume, getting rid of any contradictions by omitting one or other of the conflicting passages.[3] These statute law commissioners, as one may call them, set to work forthwith, and completed their task in fourteen months, distributing the constitutions which they placed in the new collection into ten books, in general conformity with the order of the Perpetual Edict as settled by Salvius Julianus and enacted by Hadrian. By this means the bulk of the statute law was immensely reduced, its obscurities and internal discrepancies in great measure removed, its provisions adapted, by the abrogation of what was obsolete, to the circumstances of Justinian’s own time. This Codex constitutionum was formally promulgated and enacted as one great consolidating statute in 529, all imperial ordinances not included in it being repealed at one stroke.
The success of this first experiment encouraged the emperor to attempt the more difficult enterprise of simplifying and digesting the older law contained in the treatises of the jurists. Before entering on this, however, he wisely took the preliminary step of settling the more important of the legal questions as to which the older jurists had been divided in opinion, and which had therefore remained sources of difficulty, a difficulty aggravated by the general decline, during the last two centuries, of the level of forensic and judicial learning. This was accomplished by a series of constitutions known as the “Fifty Decisions” (Quinquaginta decisiones), along with which there were published other ordinances amending the law in a variety of points, in which old and now inconvenient rules had been suffered to subsist. Then in December 530 a new commission was appointed, consisting of sixteen eminent lawyers, of whom the president, the famous Tribonian (who had already served on the previous commission), was an exalted official (quaestor), four were professors of law, and the remaining eleven practising advocates. The instructions given to them by the emperor were as follows:—they were to procure and peruse all the writings of all the authorized jurists (those who had enjoyed the jus respondendi); were to extract from these writings whatever was of most permanent and substantial value, with power to change the expressions of the author wherever conciseness or clearness would be thereby promoted, or wherever such a change was needed in order to adapt his language to the condition of the law as it stood in Justinian’s time; were to avoid repetitions and contradictions by giving only one statement of the law upon each point; were to insert nothing at variance with any provision contained in the Codex constitutionum; and were to distribute the results of their labours into fifty books, subdividing each book into titles, and following generally the order of the Perpetual Edict.[4]