Tribonian
Tribonian turned a thousand years of Roman law into a book, and European law has been arguing with it ever since. He was a lawyer from Pamphylia who rose to be quaestor of the sacred palace - the empire's senior legal officer - under Justinian. The problem he was given was real and old. Roman law existed as centuries of imperial edicts and juristic commentary, much of it contradictory, most of it scattered, and no court could reliably find what applied. From 529 he led commissions that produced the Corpus Juris Civilis in about five years: the Codex of imperial constitutions, the Digest - fifty books distilled from some two thousand rolls of juristic writing, done in three years when ten had been allowed - and the Institutes, a textbook for students that is still readable as one. The method was frank about itself. Contradictions were resolved by editing the texts, and the edited versions were declared to be the law, which preserved the substance of classical jurisprudence and destroyed the originals it was drawn from. He was dismissed during the Nika riots of 532, when the crowd demanded his removal along with the praetorian prefect's, on charges of venality that contemporaries considered well founded. Justinian reinstated him within about a year, because the work was not finished and nobody else could do it. The Digest was rediscovered in eleventh-century Bologna and became the foundation of the civil-law tradition that governs most of the world outside the English-speaking countries. Almost everything known about classical Roman law is known through the version he edited.
- Lived: 485 CE – 542 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: scholar, politician
