CODEX GREGORIANUS. – This was the title given to a collection of Roman imperial constitutions compiled in the age of Diocletian, as is shown by the attribution of the greater number of the constitutions it contains and, according to Rotondi, published later, in A.D. 291. The constitutions in question appear for the most part to have been extracted directly from the imperial archives; a few, however, were drawn from the writings of the jurists. The code is a private work owing to the compiler Gregorius (not Gregorianus, as Huschke believed), whom Mommsen considers to have been a professor at the University of Beirut.
The code has come down to us only in fragments reassembled in the later collections of the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (v.), the Fragmenta Vaticana (v.), the Consultatio veteris iurisconsulti (v.), and the Justinian Code (v. CORPUS IURIS CIVILIS), and subsequently also used in the two Roman-barbarian laws, the Visigothic and the Burgundian.
These fragments are referred to as Gregorianus Codex, and at times simply as Gregorianus, hence the illusory basis for a jurist of that name, author of the collection.
A reconstructive examination of the code’s original plan would have established that its first thirteen books followed the systematic structure of the perpetual edict and that, in the various titles into which the individual books were divided, the respective constitutions were grouped in chronological order. The order of this code was followed, in the corresponding part, by the Justinian Code, but with a simplification of the many titles that the C. G. had introduced.
Among the fragments preserved from this code, there are no provisions of an ecclesiastical character.