ntur, recepta auctoritate firmanda runt, et omni
veneratione celebranda. Ideoque sententiarum libros plepissima luce
et perfectissima elocutione et justissima juris ratione succinctos in
judiciis prolatos valere minimie dubitatur. Dat. V. Kalend. Oct. Trovia
Coust. et Max. Coss. (327.)--W]

Chapter XLIV: Idea Of The Roman Jurisprudence.--Part IV.

When Justinian ascended the throne, the reformation of the Roman
jurisprudence was an arduous but indispensable task. In the space of ten
centuries, 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 subjects of the Greek provinces were ignorant of the
language that disposed of their lives and properties; and the barbarous
dialect of the Latins was imperfectly studied in the academies of
Berytus and Constantinople. As an Illyrian soldier, that idiom was
familiar to the infancy of Justinian; his youth had been instructed by
the lessons of jurisprudence, and his Imperial choice selected the most
learned civilians of the East, to labor with their sovereign in the
work of reformation. [71] The theory of professors was assisted by the
practice of advocates, and the experience of magistrates; and the
whole undertaking was animated by the spirit of Tribonian. [72] This
extraordinary man, the object of so much praise and censure, was
a native of Side in Pamphylia; and his genius, like that of Bacon,
embraced, as his own, all the business and knowledge of the age.
Tribonian composed, both in prose and verse, on a strange diversity of
curious and abstruse subjects: [73] a double panegyric of Justinian and
the life of the philosopher Theodotus; the nature of happiness and the
duties of government; Homer's catalogue and the four-and-twenty sorts of
metre; the astronomical canon of Ptolemy; the changes of the months;
the houses of the planets; and the harmonic system of the world. To the
literature of Greece he added the use of the Latin tonque; the Roman
civilians were deposited in his library and in his mind; and he most
assiduously cultivated those arts which opened the road of wealth and
preferment. From the bar of the Praetorian praefects, he raised himself
to the honors of quaestor, of consul, and of master of the offices: the
council of Justini