Penna, Daphne

legal historian of Byzantine law, co-author of an English source book on Byzantine law

Byzantine law, its experts, and its languages — Daphne Penna

Andrea Cirla · Oct 17, 2025 · partial coverage

• Byzantine law
• Roman law
• Justinian
• Basilica
• scholia
• antecessores
• Digest
• Peira
• legal history
• Greek
• Latin
• Daphne Penna

Coverage note: full (about fifty minutes; YouTube auto-captions in English, generally accurate, with a few garbled names of editors and jurists)

Core ideas

What Byzantine law is. Penna starts from the fact that "Byzantine" is a made-up term: "Bzanti law is a Roman law but then in Greek", the law of the eastern Roman Empire. If a line must be drawn, it is Justinian (sixth century): his four-part codification (Code, Digest, Institutes, Novels) was mostly in Latin, which most easterners could not read, so the law professors (the antecessores) produced Greek summaries, commentaries and adaptations that kept many Latin terms. These are the "godfathers" of Byzantine law and the basis of the Basilica (around 900), the great Greek compilation of Justinianic law, which later accumulated scholia, the "old" ones from the antecessores and the "new" ones by eleventh and twelfth-century jurists. The Digest, built from fragments of second- and third-century Roman jurists and a code with the status of a single law, is also, as the host adds, the main source for classical Roman law, and Justinian's team already abridged and edited it.

Why it is neglected. Roman law is central to European civil codes, so Romanists study Justinian but not what came after; Greek is a barrier, and "Byzantine" suggests decadence. In the West, Roman law was largely forgotten between the sixth and eleventh centuries and "rediscovered" at Bologna around 1100: "in the east there was no gap", and the Byzantine jurists (closer to the texts in content as well as geography) kept commenting, with a small revival of legal studies in the eleventh century (Constantine IX appointed Xiphilinos nomophylax, head of the law school, and required him to know Latin). Western legal histories do not mention this, and the host adds that the Western tradition put the Rome/Byzantium break at Justinian precisely to keep his corpus for the Latin West. The texts are hard: technical legal Greek, Latin terms in Greek letters (so one needs Roman law), many layers (the critical edition of the Basilica has seventeen volumes), and often no critical edition at all, so that "it's a bit like an archaeologist digging into the different layers of of the sources."

Authors, practice, and the state of the field. Penna mentions Theophilus's verse introduction to law for a future emperor, Balsamon's remark that provincials were excused from not having the Basilica, a twelfth-century jurist who wrote about two hundred lengthy scholia (on theft, damage, liability), and an eleventh-century treatise on bare agreements. The best evidence of practice is the Peira, the decisions of the judge Eustathios Romaios, newly edited with a German translation (about 1,200 pages). The host argues that Roman law structured social relations in the East, including social classes defined legally, so non-legal historians should pay more attention; Penna acknowledges the distinction between "law in books" and "law in action". The field is small, strong in Greece (Athens, Thessaloniki, Komotini), Germany and Italy, and she is optimistic, as historians now ask legal specialists for help; her next project is Byzantine justice.

Excerpts