Works & Councils of Toledo 45

The Emperor Justinian Augustus to Acacius, most magnificent proconsul of Armenia. Desiring that the province of the Armenians be perfectly ruled by good laws, and differ in nothing from the rest of the commonwealth, we have, with their former titles abolished, adorned it with Roman magistracies, accustomed them to use the Roman habit, and finally ordained that among them there be no other laws than those which they call Roman.

Accordingly, having also written a law, we have judged that that which is wrongly transgressed among them ought to be corrected: namely, that the successions of parents and brothers and of the rest of the kindred should not, after the barbaric manner, pertain to the males and not likewise to the women, nor that these should pass without dowry into the husband's house, or be bought back by those with whom they are to keep company—a thing which has been approved by their customs to this very day in a manner far more barbaric, not only they themselves holding such opinions in a brutish manner, but other nations also thus dishonoring nature, and afflicting the female sex with insult, as if it too were not created by God, or contributed nothing to generation, but ought to be held as abject and ignominious, beyond all esteem and honor.

We ordain therefore, by this sacred law, that among the Armenians too, on occasion of the succession of women, the same rules obtain as among us, and that there be no difference between male and female; but in the very form in which it has been established among our own people—that they succeed to parents, that is, to father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, and the more remote, likewise to descendants, that is, to son and daughter, and that in turn they too be succeeded—so let it be also among them, and let the Armenian laws not differ from the Roman. For if they are of our commonwealth, if they serve us on equal terms with the other nations, if they enjoy all our privileges, shall the women alone among them be excluded from the equality introduced by us?

But let our laws be in equal observance among all, whether those which we have gathered from the books of the ancients and have arranged in our Institutes and Digest, or those which have been subscribed by imperial sanction, both of former princes and of our own. Wherefore we ordain that all these, taking their beginning from the commencement of the present fourteenth indiction, and of that very year in which we write this law, shall be valid for all time. For to inquire too curiously into old things, and to recur to times already past, belongs rather to confusion than to legislation.

But (as we have said) from this time of the present fourteenth indiction and of that very year, for all the remaining time, let the successions themselves be like those which from whatever cause pertain to succession, to be henceforth equally observed both among women and also among men. But that which already existed before, this we wish wholly to remain in the former form, whether it has been done in those estates which the founder of the family once assigned to his own house, or in others having no community with female persons—in those estates which they ineptly call genearchic, that is, assigned of old by the founder of the family to his own house, or in successions which fell due up to the thirteenth indiction and that very year.

But from the aforesaid time, that is, from the fourteenth indiction, we ordain that the things also which have been established by us be valid. The things, then, which have pleased us and are expressed through this law, let both Your Magnificence, and those who after you shall undertake the same magistracy, be zealous to observe in perpetuity. Given on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of April, at Constantinople, after Belisarius, vir clarissimus, was consul.