18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW 589 delegate to any person. Hence Roman governors could by their Edicts and their judicial action mould the law and give it a shape suitable to the needs of their province with a free- dom of handling which facilitated the passage from local law or custom to the jurisprudence of the Empire generally. (5) Roman law itself, i. e. the law of the city, went on expanding and changing, ridding itself of its purely national and technical peculiarities, till it became fit to be the law of the whole world. This process kept step with, and was the natural expression of, the political and social assimi- lation of Rome to the provinces and of the provinces to Rome. At the death of Theodosius the Great the Roman Empire was finally divided into an Eastern and a Western half; so that thenceforward there were two legislative authorities. For the sake of keeping the law as uniform as possible, ar- rangements were made for the transmission by each Emperor to the other of such ordinances as he might issue, in order that these might be, if approved, issued for the other half of the Empire. These arrangements, however, were not fully carried out: and before long the Western Empire drifted into so rough a sea that legislation practically stopped. The great Codex of Theodosius the Second (a collection of imperial enactments published in a. d. 438) was however promulgated in the Western as well as in the Eastern part of the Empire, whereas the later Codex and Digest of Jus- tinian, published nearly a century later, was enacted only for the East, though presently extended (by re-conquest) to Italy, Sicily, and Africa. Parts of the Theodosian Codex were embodied in the manuals of law made for the use of their Roman subjects by some of the barbarian kings. It continued to be recognized in the Western provinces after the extinction of the imperial line in the West in a. d. 476 : and was indeed, along with the manuals aforesaid, the prin- cipal source whence during a long period the Roman popu- lation drew their law in the provinces out of which the king- doms of the Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths were formed. Then came the torpor of the Dark Ages.
