f whose ability, legal knowledge, and
trusty observance of our orders we have received many and genuine
proofs, and especially commissioned them to compose by our authority and
advice a book of Institutes, whereby you may be enabled to learn your
first lessons in law no longer from ancient fables, but to grasp them by
the brilliant light of imperial learning, and that your ears and minds
may receive nothing useless or incorrect, but only what holds good in
actual fact. And thus whereas in past time even the foremost of you were
unable to read the imperial constitutions until after four years, you,
who have been so honoured and fortunate as to receive both the beginning
and the end of your legal teaching from the mouth of the Emperor, can
now enter on the study of them without delay. After the completion
therefore of the fifty books of the Digest or Pandects, in which all
the earlier law has been collected by the aid of the said distinguished
Tribonian and other illustrious and most able men, we directed the
division of these same Institutes into four books, comprising the
first elements of the whole science of law. In these the law previously
obtaining has been briefly stated, as well as that which after becoming
disused has been again brought to light by our imperial aid. Compiled
from all the Institutes of our ancient jurists, and in particular from
the commentaries of our Gaius on both the Institutes and the common
cases, and from many other legal works, these Institutes were submitted
to us by the three learned men aforesaid, and after reading
and examining them we have given them the fullest force of our
constitutions.

Receive then these laws with your best powers and with the eagerness of
study, and show yourselves so learned as to be encouraged to hope that
when you have compassed the whole field of law you may have ability to
govern such portion of the state as may be entrusted to you.

Given at Constantinople the 21st day of November, in the third consulate
of the Emperor Justinian, Father of his Country, ever august.

BOOK I.

TITLES
I. Of Justice and Law
II. Of the law of nature, the law of nations,
and the civil law
III. Of the law of persons
IV. Of men free born
V. Of freedmen
VI. Of persons unable to manumit, and the
causes of their incapacity
VII. Of the repeal of the lex Fufia Caninia
VIII. Of persons independent or dependent
IX