Registri supremi. Codici legislativi e punizioni oltremondane in età imperiale e protobizantina = Sublime Archives. Legislative Codes and otherworldly Punishments in the Imperial and Early Byzantine Periods

This paper is devoted to examining the ancient Roman and proto-Byzantine penal system as it emerges from the study of literary and legal sources, with particular attention to the union be-tween the religious and political spheres. It con-siders the long period stretching from classical times to the great legislative codification of the Justinian era and its long-term developments. This also reveals different types of representations of a primordial form of the afterlife, which change in the face of a progressive transformation of culture and collective mentality. Similarly, it seeks to demonstrate the difficult but continuous relation-ship between the development of a theocratic sys-tem of power, increasingly prominent in the east-ern part of the Empire, and the growing influence of the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy in the West. If the Corpus Iuris Civilis marks the begin-ning of a new era in the history of law and repre-sents the ideal synthesis of all previous narratives relating to the human-divine relationship, so too does the work of Gregory the Great prelude the foundation of new Christianised scenarios to populate the medieval imagination.