The classical period of Roman law is conventionally taken to have ended in AD 235 with the death of the emperor Sever us Alexander. It is true that the line of independent classical jurists breaks off there. But this was not a collapse but a change of direction. The leading jurists increasingly became involved in the process of imperial law-making; and their works were the constitutions they composed in the name of their emperor. The constitutions of Diocletian in particular (AD 284–305) show that half a century after the end of the classical period the standards of classical jurisprudence had been maintained. But this was not a period in which new original juristic work appeared; instead the trend was towards the production of anthologies or epitomes of leading classical works. It therefore seems appropriate to refer to the period from about AD 235 to 305 as the ‘epiclassical’ period of Roman law and to date the decisive break between the classical and the post-classical to about AD 300 (Wieacker 1971).

Yet the culmination of the classical tradition of Roman law was still to come. It came in the shape of the classical revival which took place during the reign of the emperor Justinian, and whose leading event was the compilation of the various parts of the Corpus iuris civilis. But by this time the western half of the Roman empire had long since fallen to barbarian invasion. Although during his reign Justinian succeeded in reconquering Italy as well as north Africa and Spain, these gains were soon reversed.