Eustathios Rhomaios: Judge and Jurist of the Byzantine Empire
Eustathios Rhomaios was a prominent Byzantine judge and jurist during the late-10th and early- to mid-11th century. He studied Roman Law and began his career under Basil II (reign 976 to 1025) and became the chief judge during the mid-1020s. His legal decisions, collected and compiled into a document called the Peira ('Experience') by a younger colleague of his, were not only celebrated during his own lifetime but also hailed in later ages as 'the most elegant and valued.' Rhomaios was not the subject of any hisotrical writings, but he did leave an impressive career record and a unique approach to practising law where he advocated compassionate judgement and discretionary adjudicition.
Life & Career
We do not know Eustathios’ family name, because the name Rhomaios could either mean the 'inhabitant of Rome', in this case the New Rome Constantinople, or refer to someone familiar with Italian wisdom, which was what the Byzantines called the Roman law in his case. So Eustathios could have been a native of Constantinople or gained the name later in his life because of his expertise in Roman law. In addition, we do know that he came from a family of lawyers: his grandfather and perhaps his uncle had served in the imperial judiciary in the 10th century. Therefore, we could reasonably assume that Eustathios Rhomaios was perhaps a part of the new emerging middling class of the Byzantine society and did not have any link to any of the powerful aristocratic families.
Perhaps like most of the future elites intending to enter into imperial service, Eustathios Rhomaios received a comprehensive primary education (enkyklios paideia) at a young age. Then he most likely learned law from a private tutoring school that taught law as one of the advanced subjects, among which were literature, philosophy and theology. Rhomaios no doubt focused his attention on law, but he also obtained a knowledge of classical rhetoric that he put to good use: we find references to Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Diodorus Siculus in his composition of legal opinions, which not only reinforced his judicial opinions but also rendered them more easily approved when read by other judges with an educational background similar to his.
After his legal education, Rhomaios started his career first serving as a junior judge under Basil II. He quickly gained fame for his acute mind and for identifying the legality of specific cases, as well as his wisdom in solving legal conundrums and disputes between plaintiff and defendant. As a result, his career benefited and he climbed the judicial-bureaucratic ranks, accumulating both prestige and authority. He was first a Judge (kritēs), then appointed amongst the Judges of the Velum (kritē tou bēlou) and Judges of the Hippodrome (kritē epi tou ippdromou), both of which were senior judicial positions residing at the higher court of the empire in Constantinople and were responsible for adjudicating cases involving nobility and elites or offering legal counsel for the emperor. Accompanying Rhomaios’ rise in the judiciary was his gradual promotion in the imperial honorary hierarchy, from veste, to patrikios to eventually the highest civil honour one could obtain at that time, magistros. These titles came with a substantial annual salary (roga) that would have allowed Rhomaios to amass a sizeable fortune for himself and perhaps his family, whom unfortunately we do not have any information of.
When Romanos III Argyros (reign 1028-1034), a former colleague of Eustathios and a judge/jurist himself, became emperor in 1028, Rhomaios was appointed droungarios of the vigla. This title had fromerly been granted to the captain in charge of an elite regiment of the imperial guard, but under Romanos III it was converted into a civil office not only overseeing all daily legal activities of the empire but also providing crucial political advice for the emperor. Rhomaios likely retired after Romanos III’s death but still managed to keep some of his influence after 1030s.
According to the Byzantine historian Micheal Psellos, in the 1040s there was a reactionary force among the older judges who were dissatisfied with the establishment of the law school and the appointment of Ioannes Xiphilinos, the later Ecumenical Patriarch from 1064 to 1075, as its master under emperor Constantine VIII (reign 1025-28). The new school and its master created a standardized legal curriculum and required all legal decisions at court to be reviewed regularly by the jurists of the school, but this new approach to law was not shared by the judges who had established themselves through not only legal knowledge but also years of experience and networking. It is likely that these older judges were pleased to see the short-lived nature of this new way of teaching law and training future judges and chose to rally together to oppose its founding. Among these judges was a Michael Ophrydas, a regular associate of Rhomaios who was singled out by Psellos as one of the conspirators of the plot. Psellos also mentioned and hinted another ‘old and elusive figure who viciously attacked him (Xiphilinos),’ and considering Rhomaios’ prestige, it could very likely be him beign referred to here. But we lack the sources to give a definitive answer about what exactly happened other than Psellos’s biased words three decades later and who else was involved other than Xiphilinos and Ophrydas. For all we know, the lack of actual judicial experience of Xiphilinos might also be the true cause of the slander.
Sometime in the 1030s, either an assistant of Eustathios Rhomaios or an early career judge who admired Eustathios’s rulings collected most of Rhomaios’ legal verdicts and opinions and put together a document called Peira or ‘Experience.’ The document itself survived in its full form in a single 15th-century Greek manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.80.6) as well as in fragmentary excerpts in the work of 14th-century jurist and judge Constantine Harmenopoulos and in various later scholia on the Basilika, the 10th Century Byzantine Greek translation of the Justinian law. Because Eustathios Rhomaios did not appear in any contemporary historiography and only a few of his own legal writings (among them a legal treatise on the condition of marriage) other than Peira have come down to us, we do not have a lot of biographical information on Rhomaios. So, in this sense, Peira is crucial for us to reconstruct the long life and celebrated career of Rhomaios, despite itself being an inviable document shedding insight into the practices of Roman law in the Byzantine empire.
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