APPENDIX 525 the i^revious method of computation. This reasoning was confirmed especially by one fact (Bury, op. cit. p. 426) — the eclipse of the sun noticed by Theophanes under a.m. 0252, on Friday, Aug. 1.5, clearly the annular eclipse of a.d. 700 on that day of the month and week. The received chronology would imply that the eclipse took place in a.d. 701, Aug. 15; but astronomy assuzes us that there was no eclipse on that day, nor was that day Friday. It follows that the dates of forty-seven years in the 8th century (from 726-7 to 773-4, are a year wrong. Thus Leo III. died, not in 741, but in 740 ; the Iconoclastic Synod was held, not in 7.54, but in 753. These conclusions have been recently- confirmed and developed by M. H. Hubert (Chronologie de Theophane, in Byz. Zeitschrift, vi., p. 491 sqq., 1897), who has gone through the Papal acts and letters of the period. He points out two im- portant consequences of the revised dating. While the Iconoclastic Council of Constantinople was sitting, there were deputies of the Pope in that city, — though not necessarily as his representatives at the Council. More important still is the circumstance that the Council preceded the journe3- of Pope Stephen II. (in 754) to the court of Pippin and the famous compact which he concluded with the Frank king at Quiersy. The Council would thus appear to be the event which definitely decided the secession of Rome from the Empire. 11. GRAECO-ROMAN LA.W— (P. 184) The general history of Byzantine law, from Justinian to the fall of the Empire, may be gi'ouped imder two epochs easilj' remembered : the attempt of the first Iconoclastic Emperors to legislate on new Christian principles, and the return to the Roman principles of the Justinianean law by the first ' ' Macedonian " sovereigns. A word must first be said of the substitution of the Greek for the Latin lan- guage in the domain of law. The great legal works of the Illyrian Justinian were composed in Latin, his native tongue. But the fact that to the greater part of the Empire ruled by him, and a still greater part of the Empire ruled by his successors, Latin was unintelligible, rendered a change of vehicle simply inevi- table. The work of transformation began in his own reign. He issued most of his later laws (the Novels) in Greek, and in Novel 7 (15, ed. Zach.) expressly re- cognises the necessity of using " the common Greek tongue " ; Theophilus pre- pared a Greek paraphrase of the Institutes ; and Dorotheus translated the Digest. The Code was also, immediately after its publication in Latin, issued (perhaps incompletely ) in a Greek form. ^ After Justinian's time the study of legal texts in Latin seems, at Constantinople and in the Greek part of the Empire, to have soon ceased altogether. In the troubles of the 7th century the study of law, like many other things, declined ; and in the practical administration of justice the prescriptions of the Code and Digest were often ignored, or modified by the alien precepts of Christianity. The religion of the Empire had exerted but ver^- slight influence — no fundamental influence, we may say — on the Justinianean law. Leo III. , the founder of the Syrian (vulgarly called Isaurian) dj'nasty, when he restored the Empire after a generation of anarch}', saw the necessity of legislation to meet the changed cii-cumstances of the time. The settlements of foreigners — Slavs and Mardaites — in the provinces of the Empire created an agrarian question, which he dealt with in his Agrarian Code. The increase of Slavonic and Sara- cenic piracy demanded increased securities for maritime trade, and this was dealt with in a Navigation Code. But it was not only for special relations that Leo made laws ; he legislated also, and in an entirely new way, for the general rela- tions of life. He issued a law book (in a.d. 740 in the name of himself and his son Conatantine), which changed and modified the Roman law, as it had been 1 Cp. 2acharia, Gr.-Rom. Recht, p. 6.
