Codex Gregorianus

CODEX GREGORIANUS. - This was the name given to a collection of Roman imperial constitutions made in the age of Diocletian, as follows from the attribution of the greater number of the constitutions that form part of it and, according to Rotondi, published later in 291 A.D. The constitutions in question appear for the most part to have been extracted directly from the imperial archives; a few, on the other hand, were drawn from the writings of the jurists. The code is a private work due to the compiler Gregorius (not Gregorianus, as Huschke believed), whom Mommsen considers to have been a professor at the University of Berytus.

The code has come down to us only in fragments reassembled in the later collections of the Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (v.), in the Fragmenta Vaticana (v.), in the Consultatio veteris iurisconsulti (v.), in the Justinian Code (v. CORPUS IURIS CIVILIS), and subsequently used also in the two Romano-barbarian laws, the Visigothic and the Burgundian.

Such fragments are designated as Gregorianus Codex, and sometimes simply Gregorianus, whence the illusory supposition of a jurist of that name as the author of the collection.

The reconstructive examination of the original plan of the code is said to have established that its first thirteen books followed the systematic scheme 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 of this code that have been preserved, there appear no provisions of an ecclesiastical character.

Antonio Rota