OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
467
was reduced to ashes by the author of the Pandects, from the vain persuasion that it was now either false or superfluous. Without usurping an office so invidious, the emperor might safely commit to ignorance and time the accomplishment of this destructive wish. Before the invention of printing and paper, the labour and the materials of writing could be purchased only by the rich; and it may reasonably be computed that the price of books was an hundredfold their present value.[1] Copies were slowly multiplied and cautiously renewed; the hopes of profit tempted the sacrilegious scribes to eraze the characters of antiquity; and Sophocles or Tacitus were obliged to resign the parchment to missals, homilies, and the golden legend.[2] If such was the fate of the most beautiful compositions of genius, what stability could be expected for the dull and barren works of an obsolete science? The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few and entertaining to none; their value was connected with present use; and they sunk for ever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority. In the age of peace and learning, between Cicero and the last of the Antonines, many losses had been already sustained, and some luminaries of the school, or forum, were known only to the curious by tradition and report. Three hundred and sixty years of disorder and decay accelerated the progress of oblivion; and it may fairly be presumed that of the writings which Justinian is accused of neglecting many were no longer to be found in the libraries of the East.[3] The copies of Papinian or Ulpian, which
- ↑ When Fust, or Faustus, sold at Paris his first printed Bibles as manuscripts, the price of a parchment copy was reduced from four or five hundred to sixty, fifty, and forty crowns. The public was at first pleased with the cheapness, and at length provoked by the discovery of the fraud (Mattaire, Annal. Typograph. tom. i. p. 12; first edition).
- ↑ This execrable practice prevailed from the viiith, and more especially from the xiith, century, when it became almost universal (Montfaucon, in the Mémoires de l'Académie, tom. vi. p. 606, &c. Bibliothèque Raisonnée de la Diplomatique, tom. i. p. 176).
- ↑ Pomponius (Pandect. l. i. tit. ii. leg. 2 [leg. 30]) observes that of the three founders of the civil law, Mutius, Brutus, and Manilius, extant volumina, Scripta Manilii monumenta; that of some old republican lawyers, hæc versantur eorum scripta inter manus hominum. Eight of the Augustan sages were reduced to a compendium: of Cascellius, scripta non extant sed unus liber, &c.; of Trebatius, minus frequentantur; of Tubero, libri parum grati sunt. Many quotations in the Pandects are derived from books which Tribonian never saw; and, in the long period from the viith to the xiiith century of Rome, the apparent reading of the moderns successively depends on the knowledge and veracity of their predecessors. [The chief monuments of Roman law previous to Justinian are: (1) the Fragments of Ulpian, discovered in 1544; (2) the Commentaries of Gaius, discovered at Verona in 1816;
