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Justinian's "Institutes"
English, Latin
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 533
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172 people want to read
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Justinian I
229 books12 followersFrom 527, Saint Justinian I, originally Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus, Byzantine emperor, held the eastern frontier against the Persians; reconquered former Roman territories in Africa, Italy, and Spain; and ruled jointly with Theodora, his wife, to 565.
Belisarius, his general, led campaigns against the Vandals in north and the Ostrogoths.
Saint Theodora, Byzantine empress, ruled jointly with Justinian I, her husband.
Saint Justinian I, traditionally also known as the Great in the Orthodox Church, reigned. During reign, Justinian sought to revive the greatness and the lost historical western half. Justinian constitutes a distinct epoch in the later history, and the ambitious but only partly realized "restoration" marked his reign.
Because of restoration activities, modern historiography sometimes called the "last" Justinian I. The partial recovery of the defunct west expressed this ambition. Belisarius, his general, swiftly eliminated the Vandal kingdom in north. After the kingdom of Ostrogoths for more than half a century, Belisarius, Narses, and other generals subsequently restored Dalmatia and Sicily. Liberius, the prefect, reclaimed the south of the Iberian peninsula and thus established the province. These campaigns again established control over the western Mediterranean and increased the annual revenue over a million solidi. During reign, Justinian also subdued the Tzani, a people on the coast of the Black Sea.
A still more resonant aspect of legacy of Justinian I rewrote the Corpus Juris Civilis, still the basis of uniform civil law in many modern states. His reign also marked a blossoming of culture, and his building program yielded such masterpieces as the church of Hagia Sophia. A devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in the early 540s marked the end of an age of splendor.
Belisarius, his general, led campaigns against the Vandals in north and the Ostrogoths.
Saint Theodora, Byzantine empress, ruled jointly with Justinian I, her husband.
Saint Justinian I, traditionally also known as the Great in the Orthodox Church, reigned. During reign, Justinian sought to revive the greatness and the lost historical western half. Justinian constitutes a distinct epoch in the later history, and the ambitious but only partly realized "restoration" marked his reign.
Because of restoration activities, modern historiography sometimes called the "last" Justinian I. The partial recovery of the defunct west expressed this ambition. Belisarius, his general, swiftly eliminated the Vandal kingdom in north. After the kingdom of Ostrogoths for more than half a century, Belisarius, Narses, and other generals subsequently restored Dalmatia and Sicily. Liberius, the prefect, reclaimed the south of the Iberian peninsula and thus established the province. These campaigns again established control over the western Mediterranean and increased the annual revenue over a million solidi. During reign, Justinian also subdued the Tzani, a people on the coast of the Black Sea.
A still more resonant aspect of legacy of Justinian I rewrote the Corpus Juris Civilis, still the basis of uniform civil law in many modern states. His reign also marked a blossoming of culture, and his building program yielded such masterpieces as the church of Hagia Sophia. A devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in the early 540s marked the end of an age of splendor.
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May 5, 2024
Instituting a new Roman legal code was probably the most lasting contribution made by Justinian, the emperor who ruled over the Eastern Roman Empire from 527 to 565 A.D. His Corpus Iulis Civilis (Body of Civil Law), crafted and promulgated between 529 and 534 A.D., remains the basis for civil law in many nations today; and for the reader who doesn’t have time to read the entire Corpus, in all its hundreds of volumes, this edition of Justinian’s Institutes can provide a helpful look at the ways in which Justinian sought to systematize and organize what had been a chaotic legal system.
Born in what is now North Macedonia, Justinian spoke Latin as his first language – a distinction that no future Byzantine emperor would ever be able to claim. Perhaps it is for that reason that he looked around him at the chaos of 6th-century Europe, and wanted to restore some measure of Roman order. After all, when Justinian came to power in Constantinople at the age of 45, he inherited an imperial system that had been through a couple of really bad centuries.
You see, Rome fell to, and was sacked by, the Visigothic ruler Alaric I in 410 A.D. – and Rome had not fallen to a foreign enemy in 900 years! The anguish this caused throughout Rome’s dominions was only increased a few decades later, in 476 A.D., when a Germanic leader known as “Odovacar the Goth” took Rome, deposed the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus, and brought the Western Roman Empire itself to an end. This did not directly affect Constantinople – the Eastern Roman Empire of which Justinian’s city was capital had broken away from the Western Roman Empire back in 330 A.D. – but Justinian, with his Roman sensibilities, had no intention of looking on idly while the Italian peninsula was being split up and fought over by enough Goths and Visigoths and Ostrogoths to populate a heavy-metal rock festival.
It was for that reason that Justinian established a policy called renovatio imperii (“restoration of the empire”). He reconquered the Italian peninsula – and that 25-year period of unity was the last time that all of Italy would be under one government until the Risorgimento of 1871. At Constantinople, he commissioned the magnificent Hagia Sophia cathedral – in its time, the largest cathedral in Christendom. And, as mentioned above, he oversaw a complete overhaul of the entire Roman legal system.
(Please note that I will be referring to Justinian as the author of the Institutes, even though we all know that the actual writing was done by a small army of legal scholars assigned to the task by Justinian.)
The Institutes would occupy the beginning of a young Byzantine candidate’s legal instruction, and in the document’s prooemium (introduction), Justinian calls upon the candidate to “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.” Sound advice for any legal scholar at the beginning of their career, I should think.
What follows is a helpful set of initial definitions. Title I, “Of Justice and Law,” sets forth that “Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due,” and adds that “The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due.” Again, one can see how such a definition of justice, delivered at the meeting point of the classical and medieval worlds, influences the way justice is defined and sought today.
Preparing the candidate for what they will encounter in law school, Justinian makes clear that “The study of law consists of two branches – law public, and law private. The former relates to the welfare of the Roman State; the latter, to the advantage of the individual citizen. Of private law, we may say then that it is of threefold origin, being collected from the precepts of nature, from those of the law of nations, or from those of the civil law of Rome.”
Title II, “Of the Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law,” might be of particular interest to the reader who wants to understand the philosophical presuppositions upon which Roman and Byzantine society were built. Justinian writes that “The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals – a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea,” and builds upon that observation by writing that “Those rules which a state enacts for its own members are peculiar to itself, and are called civil law: those rules prescribed by natural reason for all men are observed by all peoples alike, and are called the law of nations.”
Those who are interested in the differences among modern nations’ constitutions – for instance, the hallowed British tradition of an unwritten constitution that nonetheless undergirds every aspect of British life and society – might find it interesting to hear Justinian state that “The unwritten law is that which usage has approved: for ancient customs, when approved by consent of those who follow them, are like statute.” And it is interesting to hear Justinian differentiate between natural law as something universal, and the law of states as something that differs from one state to the next: “But the laws of nature, which are observed by all nations alike, are established, as it were, by divine providence, and remain ever fixed and immutable; but the municipal laws of each individual state are subject to frequent change, either by the tacit consent of the people, or by the subsequent enactment of another statute.”
Considering that Justinian writes, early in the Institutes, that “captivity and slavery…are contrary to the law of nature; for by the law of nature all men from the beginning were born free,” it is doubly frustrating to witness the damnably casual way in which the rest of the Institutes talks about slavery. When discussing, for example, the concept of usufruct – “the right of using and taking the fruits of property not one’s own, without impairing the substance of that property” – Justinian hastens to make clear that “A usufruct may be created not only in land or buildings, but also in slaves, cattle, and other objects generally”. The use of the word “objects” in regard to enslaved people appalled me – and reminds us all of what slavery always is: regarding a person, a human being, as an “object” to be utilized for labour.
Other parts of the Institutes are more interesting in terms of historical context, as when Justinian explains that the basis behind codicils can be traced back to one Lucius Lentulus: “Being on the point of death in Africa, he executed codicils, confirmed by his will, by which he begged Augustus to do something for him as a trust, and on the Emperor’s fulfilling his wishes, other persons followed the precedent and discharged trusts created in this manner”. We hear further that “Augustus called a council of certain jurists, among them Trebatius…and asked them whether the new usage could be sanctioned…and that Trebatius recommended their admission” (p. 95). I don’t know whether any of that is true or not – though I now know that Trebatius Testa was a leading Roman jurist of the 1st century B.C. – but this story does show how much Justinian wanted to associate his legal code with the glories of classical Rome’s greatest period of power.
It was also interesting to see the name “Titius” brought up over and over again, as the theoretical specific example to which the principles of the law can be applied – the John Doe of Byzantine jurisprudence. In the chapter on robbery, Justinian writes that “if a thing be let, or lent, or pledged to Titius”, and if “he suffers loss or incurs liability through its being forcibly taken from him, the action will be maintainable by him…to compensate him for what it is alleged he has lost” (p. 152). Over the course of reading the Institutes, I came to feel rather sorry for Titius; the poor fellow always seems to end up in court.
The Institutes evidently constituted the beginning of a Byzantine law student’s course of study; the Digest, the latter part. In both cases, I would think that these works of Justinian would hold particular interest for lawyers and legal scholars of the present day – all of whom can trace, in much more detail than I ever could, how these principles of Roman and Byzantine law have their echoes in the legal codes of the Western democracies of today.
Born in what is now North Macedonia, Justinian spoke Latin as his first language – a distinction that no future Byzantine emperor would ever be able to claim. Perhaps it is for that reason that he looked around him at the chaos of 6th-century Europe, and wanted to restore some measure of Roman order. After all, when Justinian came to power in Constantinople at the age of 45, he inherited an imperial system that had been through a couple of really bad centuries.
You see, Rome fell to, and was sacked by, the Visigothic ruler Alaric I in 410 A.D. – and Rome had not fallen to a foreign enemy in 900 years! The anguish this caused throughout Rome’s dominions was only increased a few decades later, in 476 A.D., when a Germanic leader known as “Odovacar the Goth” took Rome, deposed the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus, and brought the Western Roman Empire itself to an end. This did not directly affect Constantinople – the Eastern Roman Empire of which Justinian’s city was capital had broken away from the Western Roman Empire back in 330 A.D. – but Justinian, with his Roman sensibilities, had no intention of looking on idly while the Italian peninsula was being split up and fought over by enough Goths and Visigoths and Ostrogoths to populate a heavy-metal rock festival.
It was for that reason that Justinian established a policy called renovatio imperii (“restoration of the empire”). He reconquered the Italian peninsula – and that 25-year period of unity was the last time that all of Italy would be under one government until the Risorgimento of 1871. At Constantinople, he commissioned the magnificent Hagia Sophia cathedral – in its time, the largest cathedral in Christendom. And, as mentioned above, he oversaw a complete overhaul of the entire Roman legal system.
(Please note that I will be referring to Justinian as the author of the Institutes, even though we all know that the actual writing was done by a small army of legal scholars assigned to the task by Justinian.)
The Institutes would occupy the beginning of a young Byzantine candidate’s legal instruction, and in the document’s prooemium (introduction), Justinian calls upon the candidate to “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.” Sound advice for any legal scholar at the beginning of their career, I should think.
What follows is a helpful set of initial definitions. Title I, “Of Justice and Law,” sets forth that “Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due,” and adds that “The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due.” Again, one can see how such a definition of justice, delivered at the meeting point of the classical and medieval worlds, influences the way justice is defined and sought today.
Preparing the candidate for what they will encounter in law school, Justinian makes clear that “The study of law consists of two branches – law public, and law private. The former relates to the welfare of the Roman State; the latter, to the advantage of the individual citizen. Of private law, we may say then that it is of threefold origin, being collected from the precepts of nature, from those of the law of nations, or from those of the civil law of Rome.”
Title II, “Of the Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law,” might be of particular interest to the reader who wants to understand the philosophical presuppositions upon which Roman and Byzantine society were built. Justinian writes that “The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals – a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea,” and builds upon that observation by writing that “Those rules which a state enacts for its own members are peculiar to itself, and are called civil law: those rules prescribed by natural reason for all men are observed by all peoples alike, and are called the law of nations.”
Those who are interested in the differences among modern nations’ constitutions – for instance, the hallowed British tradition of an unwritten constitution that nonetheless undergirds every aspect of British life and society – might find it interesting to hear Justinian state that “The unwritten law is that which usage has approved: for ancient customs, when approved by consent of those who follow them, are like statute.” And it is interesting to hear Justinian differentiate between natural law as something universal, and the law of states as something that differs from one state to the next: “But the laws of nature, which are observed by all nations alike, are established, as it were, by divine providence, and remain ever fixed and immutable; but the municipal laws of each individual state are subject to frequent change, either by the tacit consent of the people, or by the subsequent enactment of another statute.”
Considering that Justinian writes, early in the Institutes, that “captivity and slavery…are contrary to the law of nature; for by the law of nature all men from the beginning were born free,” it is doubly frustrating to witness the damnably casual way in which the rest of the Institutes talks about slavery. When discussing, for example, the concept of usufruct – “the right of using and taking the fruits of property not one’s own, without impairing the substance of that property” – Justinian hastens to make clear that “A usufruct may be created not only in land or buildings, but also in slaves, cattle, and other objects generally”. The use of the word “objects” in regard to enslaved people appalled me – and reminds us all of what slavery always is: regarding a person, a human being, as an “object” to be utilized for labour.
Other parts of the Institutes are more interesting in terms of historical context, as when Justinian explains that the basis behind codicils can be traced back to one Lucius Lentulus: “Being on the point of death in Africa, he executed codicils, confirmed by his will, by which he begged Augustus to do something for him as a trust, and on the Emperor’s fulfilling his wishes, other persons followed the precedent and discharged trusts created in this manner”. We hear further that “Augustus called a council of certain jurists, among them Trebatius…and asked them whether the new usage could be sanctioned…and that Trebatius recommended their admission” (p. 95). I don’t know whether any of that is true or not – though I now know that Trebatius Testa was a leading Roman jurist of the 1st century B.C. – but this story does show how much Justinian wanted to associate his legal code with the glories of classical Rome’s greatest period of power.
It was also interesting to see the name “Titius” brought up over and over again, as the theoretical specific example to which the principles of the law can be applied – the John Doe of Byzantine jurisprudence. In the chapter on robbery, Justinian writes that “if a thing be let, or lent, or pledged to Titius”, and if “he suffers loss or incurs liability through its being forcibly taken from him, the action will be maintainable by him…to compensate him for what it is alleged he has lost” (p. 152). Over the course of reading the Institutes, I came to feel rather sorry for Titius; the poor fellow always seems to end up in court.
The Institutes evidently constituted the beginning of a Byzantine law student’s course of study; the Digest, the latter part. In both cases, I would think that these works of Justinian would hold particular interest for lawyers and legal scholars of the present day – all of whom can trace, in much more detail than I ever could, how these principles of Roman and Byzantine law have their echoes in the legal codes of the Western democracies of today.
October 26, 2023
During the 6th century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian commissioned the royal legal scholars of Constantinople the Herculean feat of codifying the volumes of Roman Law for the Byzantine court. The Institutes was introduced as a beginning textbook for law students. My interest in reading this was for the role natural law takes in legal reasoning.
What is Justice?
"Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of things divine and human, the science of the just and the unjust...The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due. The study of law consists of two branches, law public, and law private." (1.1)
Law of Natural vs Law of Nations
"The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures...Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished. The civil law of Rome, and the law of all nations, differ from each other thus. The laws of every people governed by statutes and customs are partly peculiar to itself, partly common to all mankind. Those rules which a state enacts for its own members are peculiar to itself, and are called civil law: those rules prescribed by natural reason for all men are observed by all peoples alike, and are called the law of nations. Thus the laws of the Roman people are partly peculiar to itself, partly common to all nations; a distinction of which we shall take notice as occasion offers." (1.2)
"The law of nations is common to the whole human race; for nations have settled certain things for themselves as occasion and the necessities of human life required. For instance, wars arose, and then followed captivity and slavery, which are contrary to the law of nature; for by the law of nature all men from the beginning were born free. The law of nations again is the source of almost all contracts" (1.2)
Freedom as the natural state
"Freedom, from which men are called free, is a man's natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution of the law of nations, against nature subjecting one man to the dominion of another." (1.3)
"by natural law all men were born free—slavery, and by consequence manumission, being unknown. But afterwards slavery came in by the law of nations" (1.5)
Part of the reasoning of some of the laws is to mimicking of nature.
In (1.11) on adoption, "It is settled that a man cannot adopt another person older than himself, for adoption imitates nature, and it would be unnatural for a son to be older than his father."
What is Justice?
"Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives to every man his due. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of things divine and human, the science of the just and the unjust...The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due. The study of law consists of two branches, law public, and law private." (1.1)
Law of Natural vs Law of Nations
"The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures...Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished. The civil law of Rome, and the law of all nations, differ from each other thus. The laws of every people governed by statutes and customs are partly peculiar to itself, partly common to all mankind. Those rules which a state enacts for its own members are peculiar to itself, and are called civil law: those rules prescribed by natural reason for all men are observed by all peoples alike, and are called the law of nations. Thus the laws of the Roman people are partly peculiar to itself, partly common to all nations; a distinction of which we shall take notice as occasion offers." (1.2)
"The law of nations is common to the whole human race; for nations have settled certain things for themselves as occasion and the necessities of human life required. For instance, wars arose, and then followed captivity and slavery, which are contrary to the law of nature; for by the law of nature all men from the beginning were born free. The law of nations again is the source of almost all contracts" (1.2)
Freedom as the natural state
"Freedom, from which men are called free, is a man's natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution of the law of nations, against nature subjecting one man to the dominion of another." (1.3)
"by natural law all men were born free—slavery, and by consequence manumission, being unknown. But afterwards slavery came in by the law of nations" (1.5)
Part of the reasoning of some of the laws is to mimicking of nature.
In (1.11) on adoption, "It is settled that a man cannot adopt another person older than himself, for adoption imitates nature, and it would be unnatural for a son to be older than his father."
June 9, 2021
Fascinating to read. Feels like Justinian really did care about the establishment of justice, and sought to both respect and improve the laws of the Romans.
July 23, 2024
Read Book 1 and part of Book 2
June 1, 2019
An important historical perspective for the legal scholar. Foundational for both the civil and common law tradition, with plenty of elements still reflected in modern jurisprudence. Easy plain English translation.
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