s also used by ecclesiastical writers for a church; in which sense the name frequently occurs in St Ambrose, St Austin, St Jerome, Sidonius Apollinaris, and other writers of the fourth and fifth centuries. The name was probably thus applied from many of the ancient churches having been formed out of the Roman halls or basilice above described.

Basilica is chiefly applied, in modern times, to churches of royal foundation, as those of St John de Lateran and St Peter of the Vatican at Rome, founded by the emperor Constantine.

Basilics were also little chapels built by the ancient Franks over the tombs of their great men, so called from their resembling the figure of the sacred basilice or churches.

Basilica, τὰ Βασιλεῖα, in the history of jurisprudence, a name given to a digest of laws, commenced by the emperor Basilus, and completed by his son Leo the philosopher. This collection, according to some, received the title of Basilica in honour of the emperor Basilus; while others think that it was so denominated from the circumstance of its containing Basilae, διατάξεις or imperial constitutions. It was begun by Basilus in the year 867, and completed by Leo in the year 880; the former having carried the work as far as forty books, and the latter having added twenty more, in which state it was published. In 911 Leo was succeeded by his son Constantinus Porphyrogennetus, from whom the Basilica received their final revision, τὰ ἐπιμελήτων μεταρρυθμίας; and the amended edition is supposed by Heinbach to have appeared about the year 945. Opinions, however, are divided as to whether the work has descended to us in the state in which it was first published by Leo, or according to the revised and improved edition of Constantine. Brunquell thinks that we possess the Basilica in the amended form; but Hoffmann considers this opinion doubtful, and his suspicions have been confirmed by the subsequent investigations of Heinbach. In the West, the Basilica never obtained the force of law; and the chief value of the collection therefore consists in the illustration it furnishes of the Justinianic body of law from which it was mostly compiled; but in this respect its utility has long been understood and acknowledged. Four complete books of the Basilica, namely, the forty-fifth, forty-sixth, forty-seventh, and forty-eighth, and fragments of two others, the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth, were published at Paris in 1557, accompanied with a Latin version, by Gentianus Hervetus. In 1566, Cujacius published, at Lyons, a Latin version of the sixteenth