Chief editor of the Code of Justinian, synthesizer of Roman law
The chief jurist of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the actual chief editor of the Corpus Juris Civilis (later called the Code of Justinian). He led a team of jurists in trimming and refining the mountainous, self-contradictory heap of a thousand years of Roman laws, precedents, and legal writings into a clearly ordered code. It was this vast labor of organization that preserved the whole legal wisdom of ancient Rome and handed it to posterity — when medieval European universities rediscovered it, the whole civil-law tradition was reborn. He is the man who 'packed up' Roman law and sent it to the future.
To set the chaotic mass of Roman law in order, Justinian handed the task to Tribonian. He and his team labored day and night, selecting, editing, and arranging from over three million lines of clashing old statutes a single unified code. This Corpus Juris Civilis became the ultimate vessel of two thousand years of Roman legal wisdom — later European civil law almost all begins by opening it.
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