Synopsis Basilicorum

When the emperor Basil I seized the throne in 867, he initiated a policy to restore the Byzantine law to its original Roman foundations. As a result, his first legal publication, the Prochiron, reestablished the old Roman system of three types of guardianship. The tenth-century Synopsis Basilicorum presented an even clearer outline of the Classical Roman system. " The eleventh-century private treatise by the lawyer Michael Attaleiates, on the other hand, acknowledged only two forms of guardianship the tutela testamentaria and the tutela legitima. At-... 

From the time of Justinian, however, it seems clear that the government now classed abandonment with other serious crimes. A later Byzantine legal manual, the early-tenth-century Epanagoge Aucta, placed Paulus s definition of abandonment as murder at the head of its title on abandonment, an indication that judges were to consider this principle first when dealing with cases of infant exposure. The Synopsis Basilicorum, the widely disseminated legal handbook of the tenth century, also defined abandonment as murder. 

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