communication, and occasionally with banishment. Manicheans, Gnostics, and Montanists were more severely dealt with, deprived of all civil rights and forbidden to meet for worship. These penalties were often enforced with much cruelty and sometimes produced sanguinary contests. The Montanists of Phrygia, being required to undergo baptism, shut themselves up in their churches, killed their wives and children, and set fire to the buildings. Similar rigours were inflicted on Jews and Samaritans, though the Jews, as a serviceable element in the population, seem to have in practice fared somewhat better than the others. It is not very easy to determine precisely how far the laws directed against heathenism were carried out. They punish apostasy with death, require all persons to undergo baptism, deprive pagans of all civil rights and privileges, and forbid any public pagan worship. In spite of this, a great number of pagans continued to exist even among the cultivated and wealthy classes of the capital. An inquisition at Constantinople in the 3rd year of Justinian's reign (Theoph. Chron. p. 153) shewed a large number of pagans in the higher official classes. An ordinance was then issued, forbidding all civil employment to persons not orthodox Christians and three months were allowed for conversion. Not long before, Justinian had taken away all the churches of the heretics, except one of the Arians, and given them to the orthodox (ib. 150). Energetic inquiries through W. Asia Minor are said to have led to the enforced baptism of 70,000 persons. Among the mountain tribes of Taygetus paganism survived till the days of Basil I. (867–886). Only at Athens, however, did persons of intellectual and social eminence continue to openly avow themselves heathens. The professors of its university, or at least the most distinguished among them, were not Christians. Although speculative moralists and mystics, making philosophy their rule of life, rather than worshippers of the old deities of Olympus, their influence was decidedly anti-Christian. In 528, on the discovery of crypto-paganism in his capital, Justinian issued several stringent constitutions, one of which, forbidding "persons persisting in the madness of Hellenism to teach any branch of knowledge," struck directly at the Athenian professors. In 529 he sent a copy of the Codex Constitutionum, containing this ordinance, to Athens, with a prohibition to teach law there, and shortly after the teaching of philosophy was similarly forbidden, and the remaining property of the Platonic Academy was seized for public purposes. This finally extinguished the university. Its head, Damascius, a neo-Platonist of Syrian birth, and by conviction a resolute heathen, and six of his colleagues proceeded (in 532) to the court of Chosroes, king of Persia, at Ctesiphon, but soon returned to the Roman empire, in which Chosroes secured for them, by a treaty he negotiated with Justinian, the freedom to live unbaptized and unmolested. They did not, however, settle again in Athens, which rapidly became a Christian city even in externals, its temples being turned into churches. So one may ascribe to Justinian the extinction in the Roman world of open and cultivated paganism as well as of the Platonic philosophy.
V. Justinian's legislation falls under two principal heads—his work as a codifier and consolidator of pre-existing law; and his own new laws, some of which were incorporated in the Codex Constitutionum, while others, published subsequently, remain as detached statutes, and go by the name of the Novels (Novellae Constitutiones.) The vast changes involved in the establishment of Christianity had rendered much of the old law, though still formally unrepealed, practically obsolete. There was therefore overwhelming necessity for sweeping reforms both in the substance and in the outward form and expression of the law. Such reforms had been attempted in the time of THEODOSIUS II., when the Theodosian Codex, containing a collection of the later constitutions, had been prepared and published A.D. 438. This, however, dealt only with the imperial constitutions, not with the writings of the jurists; and now, nearly a century later, the old evils were found as serious as ever, while the further changes in society had made the necessity for abolishing antiquated enactments even greater.
Justinian set to work so promptly after his accession that he had probably meditated already upon the measures which were called for and fixed his eyes on the men to be used as instruments. He began with the easier part of the task, the codification of jus novum, the imperial constitutions of more recent date. A commission was appointed in Feb. 528 to go through the whole mass of constitutions and select for preservation those still in force and of practical importance. In Apr. 529 the Codex Constitutionum was formally promulgated, and copies sent into every province of the empire, with directions that it should supersede all other constitutions previously in force. (See Const. Summa Reipublicae prefixed to the Codex.)
The next step was to deal with the jus vetus, the law contained in the writings of the authorized jurists, which practically included so much of the old leges, senatus consulta, and edicta as retained any practical importance. But there were many differences of opinion among the jurists whose writings had legal authority. Justinian accordingly issued a series of 50 constitutions, known as the Quinquaginta Decisiones, settling the disputed points (see Const. Cordi Nobis prefixed to the Codex). At the same time a large number of other ordinances were promulgated, amending the laws and abolishing obsolete provisions. The ground being thus cleared, he appointed a commission of 16 lawyers, under the presidency of Tribonian. Their instructions were chiefly: to collect into one body all best worth preserving in the writings of the authorized jurists, making extracts so as to avoid both repetition and contradiction, and give one statement of the law upon each of the many points where discrepant views had, formerly prevailed. Redundancies were to be cut off, errors in manuscripts or in expression set right, alterations introduced where necessary, no antinomia (contradiction) allowed to remain, nothing repealed which had been already enacted in
