A MANUAL OF ROMAN LAW THE ECLOGA LEO Ill and CONSTANTINE V. Gold Nomismata. A MANUAL OF ROMAN LAW THE ECLOGA PUBLISHED BY THE EMPERORS LEO III AND CONSTANTINE V OF ISAURIA AT CONSTANTINOPLE A·D· 726 RENDERED INTO ENGLISH BY EDWIN HANSON FRESHFIELD M·A· CAMBRILGE PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS MCMXXVI TO MY FRIEND JOHN B. BURY REGIUS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CAMBRIDGE THESE PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED PREFACE STUDENTS of Later Roman History are aware that in the beginning of the eighth century the Emperor Leo III of Isauria undertook to revise the laws com piled by Justinian, and at the same time to publish a synopsis or hand-book of law in Greek for the use of his subjects who did not know Latin. By that time knowledge of Latin was confined to the scholars of Constantinople. To this synopsis the name Ecloga was given, and the revised and simplified laws set forth in it remained in force for about one hundred and fifty years, that is till the middle of the ninth century. The Ecloga was then superseded by a new revision of the laws made by the Emperor Basil the Macedonian and his son Leo VI the Philosopher. In anticipation of their new Code, to which the name 'Basilika' was given, these Emperors, like their !saurian predecessors, published another hand-book or synopsis known to us as the Epanagoge. I am at present only concerned with the Ecloga which, as the preamble to the Epanagoge shows, the Macedonian Emperors purposely and ostentatiously ignored as a compilation of laws, mainly owing to the unpopularity of their !saurian predecessors. We know from other sources that no pains were spared to ob literate all traces of the unpopular !saurian reforms in the Church and in the Law, and the Ecloga is only referred to by Basil to disparage and belittle the memory of its author. It is certain that the religious Vlll iP!iEFACE ~he treatises compiled !saurians were purposely destroyed, and there is reason to suspect that their legal works were treated in the same way. It seems likely that the manuscript texts which have come down to us, and there are not many of them, were preserved accidentally through a mistake in the identity of their authors. The circumstances in which the !saurian law came to be known in Western Europe appear to be these. In the middle of the sixteenth century, while Sicily and Calabria formed part of the Spanish dominions of Philip II, an attempt was made to reform the Greek Basilian monasteries in those provinces. This reform was undertaken by a certain Cardinal Sileto, the pre fect of the Congregation for the Reform of the Greek rite, attached to the Vatican. The Cardinal appears to have been a man of considerable erudition and a bibliophile, and under his auspices the books of the libraries of the lesser monasteries were collected and deposited in ol)e or other of the principal monasteries, notably St Salvatore dei Greci at Messina. At a later date in the sixteenth century they were brought to Rome, and in 1780 eventually found a home in the Vatican and Grotta Ferrata. In 1826 and 1830 a list of these manuscripts in the Vatican was made by Cardinal Mai (Vat. Lat. 9582). Another list of the manuscripts found in these Sicilian and Calabrian monasteries was published in 1891 by Monseigneur Batiffol. The first printed edition of the Ecloga was made by J. Leunclavius (Johann Loewenklau). He was a friend and companion of Stefan Gerlach the chaplain