or BASILICA, in the ancient architecture, denotes a kind of public hall or court of judicature, where the princes or magistrates sat to administer justice. The word is originally Greek, ἱεράς, q. d. royal house, palace. In after times the denomination basilica was also given to other buildings of public use, as town-houses, exchanges, and the like.

Basilic is also used, in ecclesiastical writers, for a church. In which sense, this name frequently occurs in St Ambrose, St Austin, St Jerom, Sidonius Apollinaris, and other writers of the fourth and fifth centuries. It is thought that the name was thus applied, from many of the ancient churches having been formed of the Roman halls mentioned in the preceding article. In reality, on the conversion of Constantine, many of the ancient basilicas were given to the church, and turned to another use, viz. for Christian assemblies to meet in, as may be collected from that passage in Ausonius, where speaking to the emperor Gratian, he tells him, the basilicas, which heretofore were wont to be filled with men of business, were now thronged with votaries praying for his safety. By which he must needs mean, that the Roman halls or courts were turned into Christian churches: and hence, we conceive, the name basilica came to be a general name for churches in after ages.

BASILICS, in literary history, a name supposed to have been given by the emperor Leo to a collection of laws in honour of his father Basilus Macedo, who began it in the year 867, and in the execution chiefly made use of Sabbatius Protospatharius, who carried the work as far as 40 books. Leo added 20 books more, and published the work in 880. The whole, 30 years after, was corrected and improved by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, son of Leo; whence many have held him the author of the basilica.—Six books of the basilica were translated into Latin in 1557, by Gentian Heretus. An edition of the Greek basilica, with a Latin version, has been since published at Paris, in 1647, by Annib. Fabrotius, in 7 volumes. There still want 19 books, which are supposed to be lost. Fabrotius has endeavoured to supply, in some measure, the defect from the synops of the basilica, and the glosses; of which several had been made under the succeeding emperors, and contained the whole Justinian law, excepting the superfluities, in a new and more consistent order, together with the later constitutions of the emperors posterior to Justinian.