23 RENAISSANCES

We have seen that, after a post-Hellenic interregnum had declared
itself on the political plane in the brcuk-np of a unitary Roman Empire
into a mosaic of indigenous and barbarian successor-Mutt's, the emer-
gence of two new Hellenistic Christian civilifcutioiw found its political
expression in attempts to raise the Roman Empire ( from the dead.* On
the legal plane, as we have also noticed already in other nmtextH, u
Roman Law, which, in the course of ten ccnturtuH ending in JUwtinian'H
generation, had been slowly and laboriously elaborated^* meet the
complicated requirements of a sophisticated oecumenical Hellenics
Society,2 was swiftly left stranded3— and this in the ewnpuratively

,

robust Centre and East, as well as in the sickly West, of a
Hellenic World — by the rapid obsolescence of the whole way of lilt* to
which the Roman Law had come to be so nicely geared. Thereafter, the
symptoms of decay and death were followed in due courtte by mumfeHtu-
tions of fresh life on the legal, as on the political, plane; hut, in u nimeent
Orthodox Christendom and a nascent Western Christondum alike, the
impulse to provide a live law for a living society did not find its f irwt vent
in any move to reanimate a Roman Law that, in the eighth century of
the Christian Era, was sitting perched, far above contemporary head«,
on a pinnacle of the mighty mausoleum of an extinct 1 tcUentc culture,
like Noah's Ark when the subsidence of the Flood hud left that now
superfluous house-boat high and dry on the inaccessible Hummif of
Mount Ararat. In the legal sphere the iirst move in both these new
worlds was, not to raise a ghost, but to perform an act of creation, Kueh
of these two Christian societies demonstrated the sincerity of itn belief in
a Christian dispensation by attempting to create a ChrtHtiun Luw for u
would-be Christian, people. In both Christendom:*, however, thin new
departure in a would-be Christian direction waa followed by n renttm*
sance, first of the Israelitiah law that was latent in t'hmthwhy'H Scrip-
tural heritage from Jewry, and then of a Justinitmeun 1 <u\v which floated
clear again when the level at which it hud been atnmdtui WUH reached by
these resurgent civilisations' rising waters,

In Orthodox Christendom the Christian new departure wua an-
nounced, in the joint reign of the two Hyrian founder* of the Hunt
Roman Empire, Leo III and his son Constantino V, in the promulgation,
in March, A.D. 740,* of 'a Christian law book* which waa *u deliberate
attempt to change the legal system of the Empire by an application of
Christian principles',8 This revolutionary work waa published under the
'

conservative title of 'A Selection (^/cAoyr}), in Abridgment, of the Insti-
tutes, Digest, Code, and Novels of the Great Justinian1; hut it* two
imperial promulgators showed their hand and gave notice of their
aspirations by adding in the same breath that the work w«* 'glao ft
Rectification in the Direction of Greater Humanity (*al 4m8t<$/>0<i»0*f
efe rd <5taAav0/>a>7r<$r«;E>ov)'; and, in the first paragraph of the preface, the

1 See pp, 9-15, above. » Bos VI vil ifx H

* See IfLlU. %6» n, i, and VL vii. »79-8o, * '

* For the date, sec P. Collinet in Th» Cambrics* MvKwttl Hittory, vol. iv (C«mbHd«i
19*3, University Press),, p. 708.

*LS lury> t8"."1 S5.«?TO of Edward Gibbon: Tht Mttory oftht D*eU** «»rf Faff of
the Roman BM&M, Editio Minor, vol. v (London 31901, Methuen), Appendix * t, p, s«£