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. The name 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.

Basilica, τῆς Βασιλείας, 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 βασιλεῖαι 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 Porphyrogenitus, from whom the Basilica received their final revision, τὴν τελευταίαν διατάξιναι; and the amended edition is supposed by Heimbach 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 Heimbach. 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 Justinianean 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 sixtieth book, which is of great length. All the different portions which had thus been edited were collected by Dionysius Gothofredus, and printed at Hanau in 1598 and 1606. But the more extensive and complete edition of Fabrot, which appeared at Paris in 1647, superseded these imperfect publications, and proved of great service to the study of ancient jurisprudence. It is contained in seven volumes folio, and accompanied with a Latin version of the text as well as of the Greek scholia subjoined. Of the sixty books which composed this great work Fabrot supposes that he has exhibited forty-one in an entire form; but Meerman, Reitz, and others, think that this estimate admits of some abatement. About a century after the date of Fabrot's edition, Reitz published four entire books of the Basilica, namely, the forty-ninth, fiftieth, fifty-first, and fifty-second, which were inserted in the fifth volume of Meerman's Thesaurus Juris Civilis et Canonici, and, thirteen years afterwards, given to the world in a separate form, accompanied with the commentaries (as edited by Ruhnken) of Thalelatus, Theodorus, Stephanus, Cyrillus, Gohidas, and other Greek lawyers, on the titles of the Pandects and Code De Postulando sive de Advocatis, nec non de Procuratori-