CODEX GREGORIANUS

CODEX GREGORIANUS. — This name was given to a collection of Roman imperial constitutions compiled during the reign of Diocletian, as evidenced by the attribution of the majority of the constitutions contained therein and, according to Rotondi, published after 291 AD. The constitutions included in the codex appear to have been extracted mostly directly from imperial archives; only a few were derived from the writings of jurists. The codex is a private work compiled by the collector Gregorius (not Gregorianus, as Huschke believed), whom Mommsen considers to have been a professor at the University of Beirut.

The codex has come down to us only in fragments, which have been reconstructed in later compilations such as the *Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum* (q.v.), the *Fragmenta Vaticana* (q.v.), the *Consultatio veteris iurisconsulti* (q.v.), the Justinianic Code (q.V. *corpus iuris civilis*), and subsequently used in the two Romano-barbaric laws, the Visigothic and the Burgundian.

These fragments are referred to as the *Gregorianus Codex*, and sometimes simply as *Gregorianus*, which has given rise to the mistaken notion of a jurist of that name as the author of the collection.

A reconstructive examination of the original plan of the codex would suggest that its first thirteen books followed the systematic arrangement of the perpetual edict, and that within the various titles into which the individual books were divided, the respective constitutions were grouped in chronological order. The arrangement of this codex was followed, in the corresponding part, by the Justinianic Code, though with a simplification of the numerous titles introduced by the *C. G.*

Among the fragments of this codex that have been preserved, there are no provisions of an ecclesiastical nature.

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