Beacon Lights of History, Volume 03 | Page 9

of Numidian marble, and a fortune of
twenty millions of sesterces, equal to eight hundred thousand dollars.
Most of the great statesmen of Rome in the time of Cicero were either
lawyers or generals. Crassus, Pompey, P. Sextus, M. Marcellus, P.
Clodius, Asinius Pollio, C. Cicero, M. Antonius, Julius Caesar, Caelius,
Brutus, Catullus, were all celebrated for their forensic efforts.
Candidates for the bar studied four years under a distinguished jurist,
and were required to pass a rigorous examination. The judges were
chosen from members of the bar, as well as in later times the senators.
The great lawyers were not only learned in the law, but possessed great
accomplishments. Varro was a lawyer, and was the most learned man
that Rome ever produced. But under the emperors the lawyers were
chiefly distinguished for their legal attainments, like Paulus and Ulpian.
During this golden age of Roman jurisprudence many commentaries
were written on the Twelve Tables, the Perpetual Edict, the Laws of the
People, and the Decrees of the senate, as well as a vast mass of treatises
on every department of the law, most of which have perished. The
Institutes of Gaius, already mentioned, are the most valuable that
remain, and have thrown great light on some important branches
previously involved in obscurity. Their use in explaining the Institutes
of Justinian is spoken of very highly by Mackenzie, since the latter are
mainly founded on the long-lost work of Gaius. The great lawyers who
flourished from Trajan to Alexander Severus, like Gaius, Ulpian,
Paulus, Papinian, and Modestinus, had no successors who can be
compared with them, and their works became standard authorities in
the courts of law.
After the death of Alexander Severus, 235 A.D., no great accession was
made to Roman law until Theodosius II., 438 A.D., caused the

constitutions, from Constantine to his own time, to be collected and
arranged in sixteen books. This was called the Theodosian Code, which
in the West was held in high esteem. It was very influential among the
Germanic nations, serving as the chief basis of their early legislation; it
also paved the way for the more complete codification that followed in
the Justinian Code, which superseded it.
To Justinian belongs the immortal glory of reforming the jurisprudence
of the Romans. "In the space of ten centuries," says Gibbon, "the
infinite variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand
volumes, which no fortune could purchase, and no capacity could
digest. Books could not easily be found, and the judges, poor in the
midst of riches, were reduced to the exercise of their illiterate
discretion." The emperors had very early begun to issue ordinances,
under the authority of the various offices gathered into their hands; and
these, together with the answers to appeals from the lower courts made
to the emperors directly, or to the sort of supreme court which they
established, were called imperial constitutions and rescripts. Justinian
determined to unite in one body all the rules of law, whatever may have
been their origin; and in the year 528 appointed ten jurisconsults,
among whom was the celebrated Tribonian, to select and arrange the
imperial constitutions and rescripts, leaving out what was obsolete or
useless or contradictory, and to make such alterations as the
circumstances required. This was called the Code, divided into twelve
books, and comprising the constitutions from Hadrian to Justinian. It
was published in fourteen months after it was undertaken.
Justinian thereupon authorized Tribonian, then quaestor, _vir
magnificus magisteria dignitate inter agentes decoratus,_--"for great
titles were now given to the officers of the crown,"--to prepare, with the
assistance of sixteen associates, a collection of extracts from the
writings of the most eminent jurists, so as to form a body of law for the
government of the empire, with power to select and omit and alter; and
this immense work was done in three years, and published under the
title of Digest, or Pandects. Says Lord Mackenzie:
"All the judicial learning of former times was laid under contribution

by Tribonian and his colleagues. Selections from the works of
thirty-nine of the ablest lawyers, scattered over two thousand separate
treatises, were collected in one volume; and care was taken to inform
posterity that three millions of lines were abridged and reduced in these
extracts to the modest number of one hundred and fifty thousand.
Among the selected jurists only three names belonged to the age of the
republic,--the civilians who flourished under the first emperors are
seldom appealed to; so that most of the writers whose works have
contributed to the Pandects lived within a period of one hundred years.
More than a third of the whole Pandects is from Ulpian, and next to
him the principal writers are Paulus, Papinian, Salvius Julianus,
Pomponius, Q. Cervidius Scaevola, and Gaius. Though