His first step, only a few months into his reign, was the appointment of a commission to harmonise the various unwieldy collections of laws issued by previous emperors; then, a year and a half later, he charged a second commission with the even more daunting task of collating the entire stupendous body of private writings on Roman law. Complete constitutions had to be revised; almost two thousand individual books called in and minutely sifted; tens of thousands of excerpts made. The resulting codification, achieved in record time, was so staggering an achievement that it appeared to many
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