ro the Digest {D. 9.1.1.9, ii), the main action, actio depcitiperie, for injury caused by an animal lay in the Institutes on\y when the animal acted contra naturam^ "contrary to nature." Jf. yipr., git es a very different account of arra, earnest money in sale, from C 4.21.17 of s'zS from which it derives. Abov e all, the very long‘7. 4.6, dealing with actions, is a mixture of classical and Byzantine notions, and is entirely incomprehensible. Students could not possibly learn the law of procedure fromit. The answer to this extraordinary behavior of the compilers 1 have giv en in chapter i. d'he compilers were under enormous pressure to compile the Institutes as quickly as possible. It remains to add that Theophilus' Paraphrasis which is a Greek version of the Institutes, but three times as long, retains the balance of the original. How could it.^ VII Justinian's Code, Digest, Institutes have nothing Byzantine in them, d'hey do not lay bare the passions, even the interests or preoccupations of their time, d'hey also do not exhale the classicism of classical Roman law. Thev' do not reek of the courtroomor even of practicality. They do not reveal the character or interests of their instigator or constructors. We have from themno idea of how the system worked. We could not reconstruct the world of early Byzantium from the main parts of the Corpus 'Juris Civilisr I'he greatest and most influential secular collection of laws in the world does not smack of its era. If it did, no doubt its influence would have been much less. 25 The Novellae, as I remarked at the outset, are afterthoughts. 56
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