Justinian
arranged chronologically, completed the Code.

Forgotten or ignored during the lawless days of the Dark Ages, an
entire copy of this famous code was discovered when Amalphi was
taken by the Pisans in 1137. Its publication immediately attracted
the attention of the learned world. Gratian, a monk of Bologna,
compiled a digest of the canon law on the model of that work, and
soon afterward, incorporating with his writings the collections of
prior authors, gave his "decretum" to the public in 1151. From that
time the two codes, the civil and canon laws, were deemed the
principal repositories of legal knowledge, and the study of each
was considered necessary to throw light on the other.

Justinian's example in the codification of laws was followed by
almost every European nation after the eighteenth century; the Code
Napoleon (1803-04), regulating all that pertains "to the civil
rights of citizens and of property," being the most brilliant
parallel to the Justinian Code. The reader familiar with the life
of Napoleon will recall that all of his historians quote his
frequent allusion to the Code Napoleon as the one great work which
would be a living monument of his career, when the glory of all his
other achievements would be dimmed by time or forgotten.

Gibbon's examination of the Justinian Code is justly regarded as
one of the most important features of the historian's great work,
and in several of the leading universities of Europe has long been
used as a text-work on civil law.

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
selec