You Could Look It Up (4 page)

Draco’s laws, though, were limited—they introduced written law to the Athenian polis, but it was a manageable body of law. Things were very different a few centuries later in Rome, by that time not a city-state but an empire that stretched from southern Spain to Jerusalem. It comprised a great many cultures, traditions, religions, and belief systems. To turn them into a coherent political entity required a substantial administrative machinery, and the Romans obliged. Rome was always a more regulated society than Greece. The Roman emperors believed in reorganizing, codifying, and structuring. “Their legal system,” wrote Andrew Riggsby, “was vastly larger, more encompassing, more systematic, and more general than anything else that existed at the time.”
19
Their most enduring gift to humanity, if we can call it a gift, may be bureaucracy.

By the sixth century
C.E.
, though, the Empire had split in two, the Western Roman Empire centered on Rome and the Eastern Roman Empire centered on Constantinople. The Italian peninsula was nominally part of the Empire, but in practice it had become an Ostrogoth kingdom. The old order seemed to be breaking down.

This seeming chaos prompted Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus Augustus, better known as Justinian the Great, to try to reassert the authority of the Empire. Unlike most of the emperors before him, Justinian came not from aristocratic stock but from a peasant family,
and he was born not in Rome or Constantinople but in what is today part of Macedonia. His rise came when his uncle, Justin, adopted him as a son and took him to Constantinople. In 518, Justin was named emperor, and Justinian’s influence on his uncle was considerable. Justin welcomed the input and took him on as a high-ranking adviser—in 527, he became a kind of co-ruler of the empire.

Not many months later, Justin died, and Justinian was his obvious successor. One of his first concerns was to put Roman law in order. The legal system was a mess, with extensive collections of statutes, precedents, and commentaries on the laws having piled up over the centuries; by this point they were filled with redundancies and even contradictions. Legal proceedings were getting bogged down in needless complexity. Modern law, Justinian was convinced, was decadent.
20

Early in 528, therefore, he established a commission of ten legal experts, including his chief aide Tribonian and a Constantinopolitan law professor named Theophilus, and ordered them to come up with a new catalog of laws (mostly civil, but also constitutional) based on the three major legal codes of the empire. Their job was not mere compilation: they were to reject everything that was out of date, and to adjust some provisions to make them more suitable to modern conditions. This work took fourteen months.

The next step was to compile the writings of the jurists, the legal scholars, who had been commenting on the laws for generations. Tribonian was placed in charge of that process, and he charged a committee of sixteen members, including Theophilus and his colleague Dorotheus, “to make excerpts from the ancient writers of authority.” Obsolete commentaries and those that duplicated or contradicted something already in the code were eliminated. The result was the
Digest
, a compilation of fifty books, each subdivided into titles. The work displays good scholarly habits: all the excerpts came with the names of their sources, the titles from which the extracts were taken, and the volume number of the quotation.
21

While the
Digest
was still under construction, Justinian ordered the third part of his great project, a work called the
Institutes
, to serve as an introduction to the whole legal system. Tribonian, Theophilus, and Dorotheus were once again involved, and they were ordered to stick close to the writings of the classical jurists.

The resulting three-part
Corpus
had its failings: “Instead of a smooth, unified legal code, we have a document that shows its origins in cut-and-paste.”
22
But it also had many virtues. It collected and reconciled countless scattered sources and ejected obsolete and useless provisions. Most important, though, everything was structured to help the reader find what he needed to know.
23
A sequence of entries gives the flavor of the whole, as an authority is cited and the relevant provisions in the original law are presented concisely:

54. Paulus, On the Edict of the Curule Ædiles, Book I.

Where property is sold in good faith, the sale should not be annulled for a trifling reason.

55. The Same, On the Edict of the Curule Ædiles, Book
II
.

A sale without consideration and imaginary, is considered not to be made at all, and therefore the alienation of the property is not taken into consideration.

56. The Same, On the Edict, Book L.

Where anyone sells a female slave under the condition that she shall not be prostituted, and if this is violated he shall have a right to take her back; he will have power to do so, even if the slave has passed through the hands of several purchasers.

Once the
Corpus juris civilis
appeared, Justinian prohibited any further references to the old commentaries: the new
Corpus
contained all that everyone needed to know. To make the point more emphatically, Justinian ordered many of the older writings burned. There were also to be no further commentaries: all the laws had been systematically surveyed, and everything a jurist needed to know was now in the
Digest
. It was a bold act, wiping out all the laws of the past and prohibiting commentaries in the future. The latter was a failure, since even during Justinian’s life, legal scholars discovered they needed to write new commentaries.

The
Corpus
had a long afterlife. Although the ultimate collapse of the Empire’s administrative structure led to the abandonment of Roman law for centuries, Justinian’s brainchild was eventually revisited. There
was a revival of interest in Justinian’s legal code in the ninth century in the Byzantine Empire, the successor of the Eastern Roman Empire; legal scholars published a new version of the text in Greek, known as the
Basilica
, which informed Greek legal practice into the twentieth century. And in the eleventh century, in Bologna, scholars began to rediscover the Roman law in the West again. An important manuscript of the
Digest
turned up in 1070, leading to many new copies and further study. Here the influence was even more important than in Greece. The Bolognese legal scholars, who thought of themselves as citizens of an ancient Holy Roman Empire, came together to study the ancient texts. These legal students eventually joined with readers of medicine and theology and began to develop policies to govern themselves. The various groups of students and scholars decided to band together, and in 1088 established a group they called a
universitas
‘totality’. It was the first university in Europe, and it had Justinian’s
Corpus
at its heart.
24
In many ways the university as we know it had its origins in study groups that sought to make sense of a reference book.

These two reference “books”—one of them actually a monument, the other a collection of many scrolls—had major real-world significance. In making laws public and accessible, the
Code
of Hammurabi and the
Corpus
of Justinian made the law itself a public affair, and even though the laws may have been brutal and arbitrary, at least they were known. Both Hammurabi and Justinian lived in worlds where few people were literate, and their law codes likely had little influence on the lives of the overwhelming majority of people at the time. But works like Hammurabi’s
Code
and Justinian’s
Corpus
provide evidence that works of reference—whether they take the form of manuscripts, printed books, or slabs of diorite—can empower their readers. The fact that a legal code exists is an indication that the law is more than the whim of an individual tyrant, that everyone is answerable to the principles embodied in the texts.

CHAPTER
1 ½

OF MAKING MANY BOOKS

Information Overload

Drowning in information, being overwhelmed with more knowledge than we can ever know, is the modern condition. And yet it's not unique to our time. As soon as there was writing, some were convinced there was too much writing. “By these, my son, be admonished,” said the preacher in Ecclesiastes somewhere between
450
and
200
B.C.E.
: “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl.
12
:
12
). Reference books are an attempt to make these “many books” manageable; they're also a testimony to just how unmanageable they remain.

The critic Harald Weinrich identified different modes of reading. Through most of history, people practiced “intensive” reading, focusing on a few books, since a few were all they had. Pliny the Younger advised this sort of reading: “Aiunt enim
multum
legendum esse,
non multa
,” a pun on “reading a lot”: “They say you should read
much
, not
many
” things. He meant that it was better to read a few sources intensively than to flit from book to book. But the era of print enabled “extensive” reading, where we have access to many books. And starting in the twentieth century, Weinrich found evidence of “defensive” reading, when “All readers have to defend themselves against too many books and avoid reading as often as possible.”
1

Gutenberg's development of printing with movable type made possible a new kind of extensive reading. In the manuscript age every book was expensive, since someone had to copy it by hand. Even the devout and literate could not hope to own a Bible unless they were wealthy. But printing knocked the prices down to the point where a new middle class could hope to own a few volumes, and the market responded by making volumes available. According to one estimate, about 5 million
copies of books had been made in Europe between about 450 and 1450
C.E.
2
But in the half century after Gutenberg developed printing with movable type around 1450, somewhere between 8 and 20 million copies of the new printed books were circulating—more in fifty years than in the previous thousand. And in another hundred years, the number had topped 200 million.
3
The trend kept accelerating. Nobody knows how many new books appear these days, but the global figure is probably more than a million new titles annually, most of them in thousands of copies, for billions of new copies every year. The number is too large for precise counts, but by some estimates, the English-speaking world alone generates somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million titles and editions a year. On the conservative assumption that each is around 250 pages, and each page contains around 340 words, that's more than forty billion words of English text every year—116 million words a day, nearly 5 million an hour, 80,680 a minute, or 1,347 a second.

The idiom
information fatigue
is first attested in 1991, defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary
as “Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information,
esp.
(in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.”
4
The term is new, but the idea is ancient. Ecclesiastes says that “in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccl. 1:18). Writing in 1621, Robert Burton included a section in his monumental
Anatomy of Melancholy
, an account of the causes of what we would call depression, on “Loue of Learning, or overmuch study. With a Digression of the misery of Schollers.” He quoted Niccolò Machiavelli to the effect that “study weakens their bodies, dulls their spirits, abates their strength and courage, and good Schollers are never good souldiers.”
5