ow himself worthy of the throne, which he had
usurped, by purifying the administration of justice and once more reducing
the law into an intelligible code. There has been considerable controversy
as to the part which the emperor Basil took in framing the new code. There
is, however, no doubt that he abrogated in a formal manner the ancient
laws, which had fallen into desuetude, and the more probable opinion would
seem to be, that he caused a revision to be made of the ancient laws which
were to continue in force, and divided them into forty books, and that this
code of laws was subsequently enlarged and distributed into sixty books by
his son Leo the Philosopher. A further revision of this code is stated to
have been made by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the son and successor of
Leo, but this statement rests only on the authority of Theodorus Balsamon,
a very learned canonist of the 12th century, who, in his preface to the
_Nomocanon_ of Patriarch Photius, cites passages from the Basilica which
differ from the text of the code as revised by the emperor Leo. The weight
of authority, however, is against any further revision of the code having
been made after the formal revision which it underwent in the reign of the
emperor Leo, who appointed a commission of jurists under the presidency of
Sympathius, the captain of the body-guard, to revise the work of his
father, to which he makes allusion in the first of his _Novellae_. This
latter conclusion is the more probable from the circumstance, that the text
of the code, as revised by the emperor Leo, agrees with the citations from
the Basilica which occur in the works of Michael Psellus and Michael
Attaliates, both of them high dignitaries of the court of Constantinople,
who lived a century before Balsamon, and who are silent as to any second
revision of the code having taken place in the reign of Constantine
Porphyrogenitus, as well as with other citations from the Basilica, which
are found in the writings of Mathaeus Blastares and of Constantine
Harmenopulus, both of whom wrote shortly after Balsamon, and the latter of
whom was far too learned a jurist and too accurate a lawyer to cite any but
the official text of the code.

Authors are not agreed as to the origin of the term Basilica, by which the
code of the emperor Leo is now distinguished. The code itself appears to
have been originally entitled _The Revision of the Ancient Laws_ ([Greek:
he anakatharsis ton palaion nomon])