Justinian, emperor

Of course even the nineteenth-century conservation and public health movements had ancient sources. Around 530 ad, the Roman emperor Justinian codified the legal basis for natural resource protection - the idea that air, water, oceans, wildlife, and more are owned by all of us together and none of us individually, and that the sovereign has a duty to protect and conserve these resources for present and future generations. The code of Justinian eventually led to the modern public trust doctrine of environmental management and protection, described below. 

The Christian Emperor Justinian closed down Athens Platonic Academy in 529CE. The philosophers Damascius and Simplicius relocated close to Harran. Simplicius was a follower of Xenophanes Eleatic School. These philosophers would have greatly enriched society... 

In the east Emperor Justinian in the 500s strove to protect what was left of the old Roman Empire by throwing up intellectual walls. 

When I turned my attention to investigating the Byzantine child care system, I expected to find the same sort of institutional centralization around orphanotropheia, located in the empire s larger cities. Indeed, the emperor Justinian, the great legal reformer of the sixth century, placed orphanotropheia in the same legal category of pious... 

In examining the issue of mothers and their role as legal guardians, I shall naturally include specific cases of children who had lost only their fathers and therefore fell under the protection of their mothers. This study as a whole, however, will focus on what the Byzantines from the time of the emperor Justinian (527-565) judged to be true orphans, that is, children who had lost both parents. 

In the sixth century, the emperor Justinian introduced a major innovation in magisterial appointments of some guardians in the provinces. In those cases where the orphan children inherited estates valued at less than 500 solidi, the defensor of the local city together with the bishop or other municipal officials was to establish guardians. If the bishop took part, the records of appointment, which included an inventory of the property, were to be filed in the church archives. At Constantinople, Justinian entrusted these smaller cases to the praetor tutelarius, whose role in guardianship cases had previously been eclipsed by the expanding power of the urban prefect. ... 

The emperor Justinian was one of the few Byzantine sovereigns to introduce overtly Christian references or practices into the guardianship laws. In his Novel 72, he reminded all guardians that God was watching their behavior as protectors of the orphans in their care. " Justinian also required new guardians to swear on the Holy Scriptures that they would manage the property of their wards as though it were their own. ... 

The innovative emperor Justinian completely revised the laws regarding exposed infants for a second time. In 529 he issued an edict that retained Constantine s rule that parents or slave owners who exposed infants of their household lost any claim to them, but Justinian denied that the persons who took in foundlings had a right to enslave such children. As Justinian conceived of the issue, these people should not be allowed to overshadow the virtue they had displayed in rescuing the threptoi by the heartless act of enslaving them.""... 

It is possible that the orphanotrophoi began to play a part in supplying food to the poor of the capital at the end of the seventh century when the emperor Justinian II assigned the new orphanage director, Andrew of Crete, the task of supervising not only the Orphanotro-pheion, but also the nearby diakonia of Eugenios. According to Andrew s vita, the new director. 

In the sixth century, the emperor Justinian frankly admitted that he... 

Circa 400, in the ancient town of Athens, a girl by the name of Athenais lost her parents. Her father had written a will in which he divided all his property between his two sons and left his daughter Athenais only a legacy of one hundred nomismata. At this time, it was still legal to exclude some children, especially females, from the inheritance. As we learned in Chapter Four, the emperor Justinian later changed this law. 

Anna s account of her father s orphan settlement implied that, had Alexios not insisted that the orphans from Asia Minor remain free, some monasteries would have enslaved these children. Since the reign of Justinian, however, the law had required that adults who took in abandoned babies raise these children as free persons. In view of Justinian s rules, which were never revoked by subsequent emperors, how could twelfth-century Constantinopolitan monasteries have contemplated using Alexios s orphans as slaves A collection of miraculous tales and a letter of the classical scholar John Tzetzes provide valuable clues to answering this question. 

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