SYSTEMS OF LAW 39

the Byzantine spirit and partly also, no doubt, because it had done so
much to make that spirit what it had come to be—whereas the Hellenic
spirit expressed in the Late Roman Law was an alien presence in an
Orthodox Christian environment. In the Law of Marriage, for example,
'Basil returned to the Justinionean system, but the doctrine of the Kcloga
seems to have so firmly established itself in custom that Leo VI found it
necessary to make a compromise and introduced a new system which
was a mixture of the Iconoclastic and the Justinianean doctrines.'* Basil
had a similar experience when he sought to undo his Syrian predecessors'
beneficent work of humanizing the barbaric Roman institution of the
JPatria Potestas? In this sphere, likewise, 'Basil revived the Justinianean
legislation; here, however, as in many other cases, the letter of Basil's
law books was not fully adopted in practice, and was modified by a novel
of Leo VI which restored partly the law of the JBcfaga'? As for the
criminal law, 'here the system established by the Kcloga is retained in
most cases, and sometimes developed further',4 against the grain of a
Macedonian legislation which was consciously striving to depose the
Iconoclast legislators and to reinstate Justinian.

'The system of punishments provided in the Edoga continued on the
whole to set the standard for later ages. The relevant passages of the
JKeloga are for the most part incorporated into the Procheiront into the
KpMMtgQgf, and even into the Ifasilikd, some of them verbatim) some in
rather different language or in a slightly modified form—though it is at
the same time also true that the Kcloga9* system of punishments is not
retained or applied in its purity. The penal chapters of the [Justinianean]
Digest and Code have on the whole also found their way into the Vasilihd,
with the result that the Vasilikd"--particularly in contexts in which they
are concerned with crimes or misdemeanours not expressly dealt with in
the Edoga—prescribe the old [Roman] punishments which frequently
contradict the spirit of the new system.'*

The vigour with which this would-be Christian spirit continued to
assert itself against the would-be Roman spirit of an imperious Justin-
ian's impotent ghost is betrayed in a sentence in the preface to the
JSpanagogti leading up to the passage, quoted above,6 in which the Mace-
donian legislators denounce their Syrian predecessors and all their legal
works.

*The experience by which Our Majesty has been aroused and stimulated
to bestir itself to retrieve and proclaim the good world-saving law with the
utmost Heal and utmost care is what we can only describe as our initiation
in the secret chambers of the heart by the divine intervention of the
Trinity in Unity (<V TVS $u<n/dfr jAQvapxfas Kal r/tta$ucfj$> Btcrrroritasf • • »
l airop/nJretfS1 '

Thus, though the Macedonian Emperors were bent on reinstating a
Roman Law that had been disestablished—wrongfully, in their belief—
by the preceding Syrian Emperors* innovations, it never occurred to

* Hury, Appendix, p, 53% a See p, as, n. a, above*
» Hurv, Appendix, p, 538, 4 Bury, ibid,

* Jfoeniritt von Lin«enth*l, K, E,; Geschichtt fas Grtcchuch-Rtimitchen Rtchtt (Berlin
3(892, Weidminn), pp, 333-4, * On p. 37*