III Preservation

Parallel to the process of legislation and promulgation of the law was that of its preservation. The original copies of the law were preserved and their texts copied, either by various administrative personnel or by private individuals.

This stage of preservation included the recording, in continuous chronological order, in the register (commentarii) of the texts of the laws issued. There can be little doubt that the second edict of Marcian from the year 452 (No. 55b) was copied from this source, for on margins of the text appeared a list of the names of the other address­ees—an addition which, while out of place in a text sent to each person individually, was thoroughly appropriate to a listing within a register. The register would also seem to be the source of the law issued by Justinian on 28 July 531 (No. 60), as the date is given in the Justinian Code as “the year following the consulate of Lampadius and Orestes.” One cannot imagine that at such a late date in the year the names of the two consuls were still unknown in Constantinople; for that reason one may conjecture that this form of dating reflected the practice used to record laws in the register. The year was recorded in the heading of the first law issued at the beginning of the year, while subsequent laws issued in the course of that year were dated by day and month only. When the first registered law was dated by the post­consulate of those consuls that had served in the previous year, and this happened very frequently whenever the registrars were ignorant of the names of the new consuls in the beginning of the year, the laws issued at later dates in the same year were subsequently dated by the post-consulate, referring to the consuls of the previous year, even though the names of the new consuls were known. Strict attention was paid to the preservation of original documents and the recording of their texts on the lower administrative echelons. A law from 408 in the Theodosian Code (No. 37) belongs to this source. The compilers of the Codex, departing from their usual practice, preserved the text of the inscription of the law addressed to Donatus, Proconsul of Africa, writ­ten by Honorius in his own hand in the vocative case.

Two texts reflect the preservation of laws in less important cities: Colonia Agrippinensis (No. 7) and Regium (No. 17). One ought not to assume that the Codex’ compilers received these texts directly from sources in those cities. It is more likely that they were taken from some intermediate source, such as collections of laws or, according to Seeck, from proceedings of law courts sitting in the principal administrative centers which heard appeals against decisions of the lower courts.¹⁵ The documents presented before these appellate courts incorporated the texts of laws as they were promulgated in those places and pre­sented (allegata) before the lower courts. Regium was located in the diocese of the city of Rome, and appeals against verdicts given in Regium were heard in Rome; the version of a law published in Regium and cited during the appeal proceedings would be preserved in the Roman archives. Versions of the laws promulgated in Colonia Agrippi­nensis were preserved, likewise, in Viennes, which for a certain time served as the administrative center of the Prefecture of Gaul. The presence of these texts in the Theodosian Code, therefore, resulted from the direct access of the compilers of the Code to the central archives in Italy and Gaul, rather than from access to small local archives in towns which at the time were in the hands of Germans, or in a state of destruction and decline.

Thirteen laws have survived in collections assembled by private indi­viduals, whether administrators or professional jurists.

One text (No. 13) was preserved in the collection of letters of Julian the Apostate, usually seen by the ancient authors as an essentially literary work, although it includes also texts of legal and political sig­nificance. Two edicts of Marcian (No. 55) are preserved in their Latin version in several unofficial collections and translations: Collectio Vati­cana, compiled in Rome shortly after 457; the canonical Collectio Quesnelliana, compiled in southern Gaul at the beginning of the sixth century; the canonical Collectio Hispana, compiled in Spain at the end of the sixth century; and three Latin translations, made some time after 553.

The Novels of Justinian¹⁶ were preserved in a large number of pri­vate collections. The earliest of these, Epitome luliani, attributed to a professor of law from Constantinople and which enjoyed wide circula­tion in the West, includes Latin translations of 124 Novels from the years 535-555, including Nos. 64 and 65. Another collection of Latin translations is the Authenticum, which was apparently compiled in It­aly. It encompasses 134 Novels from the years 535-556, among them Nos. 62, 65, and 66. The largest and the most complete collection, which gave the Greek version of the Novels, is the Collectio 168 Novel­larum. It was compiled in Constantinople during the reign of Tiberius II (574-582), and includes 154 Novels of Justinian, among them Nos.