Codex Gregorianus

The Codex Gregorianus (Eng. Gregorian Code) is the title of a collection of constitutions (legal pronouncements) of Roman emperors over a century and a half from the 130s to 290s AD. It is believed to have been produced around 291-4 but the exact date is unknown.

The Codex takes its name from its author, a certain Gregorius (or Gregorianus), about whom nothing is known for certain, though it has been suggested that he acted as the magister libellorum (drafter of responses to petitions) to the emperors Carinus and Diocletian in the 280s and early 290s. The work does not survive intact and much about its original form remains obscure, though from the surviving references and excerpts it is clear that it was a multi-book work, subdivided into thematic headings (tituli) that contained a mixture of rescripts to private petitioners, letters to officials, and public edicts, organised chronologically. Scholars' estimates as to the number of books vary from 14 to 16, with the majority favouring 15. Where evidence of the mode of original publication is preserved, it is overwhelmingly to posting up, suggesting that Gregorius was working with material in the public domain.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, for those wishing to cite imperial constitutions, the Codex Gregorianus became a standard work of reference, often cited alongside the Codex Hermogenianus. The earliest explicit quotations are by the anonymous author of the Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio, or Lex Dei as it is sometimes known, probably in the 390s. In the early fifth century Augustine of Hippo cites the Gregorian Code in discussion of adulterous marriages. Most famously, the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes are cited as a model for the organisation of imperial constitutions since Constantine I in the directive ordering their collection in what was to become the Codex Theodosianus, addressed to the senate of Constantinople on 26 March 429, and drafted by Theodosius II's quaestor Antiochus Chuzon.

In the post-Theodosian era both Codes are quoted as sources of imperial constitutions by the mid-fifth-century anonymous author of the Consultatio veteris cuiusdam iurisconsulti (probably based in Gaul); are cited in marginal cross-references by a user of the Fragmenta Vaticana; and in notes from an eastern law school lecture course on Ulpian's Ad Sabinum.

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