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BKATJllONIA.
at Sparta in honour of their great general Brasidas, who, after his death, in b. c. 422, received the honours of a hero. (Pans. iii. 14. § 1 ; Aristot. Etli. Nic. v. 7.) It was held every year with orations and contests, in which none but Spartans were allowed to partake.
Brasideia were also celebrated at Amphipolis, which, though a colony of Athens, transferred the honour of kt’ktttis from Hagnon to Brasidas, who was buried there, and paid him heroic honours by an annual festival with sacrifices and contests. (Thucyd. v. 11.) [L. S.]
BRAURONIA (fipavpcavia a festival celebrated in honour of Artemis Brauronia, in the Attic town of Brauron (Herod, vi. 138), where, according to Pausanias (i. 23. § 9, 33. § 1, iii. 16. § 6, viii. 46. § 2), Orestes and Iphigeneia, on their return from Tauris, were supposed by the Athenians to have landed, and left the statue of the Taurian goddess. (See Muller, Dor. i. 9. § 5 and 6.) It was held every fifth year, under the superintendence of ten iepoTToioi (Pollux, viii. 9, 31); and the chief solemnity consisted in the circumstance that the Attic girls between the ages of five and ten years, dressed in crocus-coloured garments, went in solemn procession to the sanctuary (Suidas, s. v. ”ApKTos ; Schol. on Aristoph. Lysistr. 646), where they were consecrated to the goddess. During this act tlie iepoTroioi sacrificed a goat and the girls performed a propitiatory rite in which they imitated bears. This rite may have arisen simply from the circumstance that the bear was sacred to Artemis, especially in Arcadia (Muller, Dor. ii. 9. § 3) ; but a tradition preserved in Suidas (s. v. vAp«ros) relates its origin as follows: — In the Attic town of Phanidae a bear was kept, which was so tame that it was allowed to go about quite freely, and received its food from and among men. One day a girl ventured to play with it, and, on treating the animal rather harshly, it turned round and tore her to pieces. Her brothers, enraged at this, went out and killed the bear. The Athenians ;now were visited by a plague; and, when they consulted the oracle, the ansAver was given that they would get rid of the evil which had befallen them if they would compel some of their citizens to make their daughters propitiate Artemis by a rite called apjcreOetz/, for the crime committed against the animal sacred to the goddess. The command was more than obeyed ; for the Athenians decreed that from thenceforth all women, before they could marry, should have taken part once in this festival, and have been consecrated to the goddess. Hence the girls themselves were called &p/ctoi, the consecration dp/creta, the act of consecrating apKTevtiv, and to celebrate the festival ap/creutcrflcu. (Hesych. and Harpocrat. s. v. ; Schol. on Aristoph. 1. c.) But as the girls when they celebrate^ this festival were nearly ten years old, the verb Se/mreuen/ was sometimes used instead of aptcrevew. (Comp. C. F. Hermann, flandb. der’gottesdienstl. Altert/i. § 62. note 9.)
There was also a quinquennial festival called Brauronia, which was celebrated by men and dissolute women, at Brauron, in honour of Dionysus. (Aristoph. Pax.. 870, with the note of the Scholiast ; and Suidas s. v. Bpavpdov.} Whether its celebration took place at the same time as that of Artemis Brauronia (as has been supposed by Muller, Dor. ii. 9. § 5, in a note, which has, however, been omitted in the Enplish translation), must
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BREVIARIUM.
remain uncertain, although the very different cha racters of the two festivals incline iis rather to believe that they were not celebrated at the same time. According to Hesychius, whose statement, however, is not supported by any ancient authorit}^ the Iliad was recited at the Brauronian festival of Dionysus by rhapsodists. (Coinp. Hemsterh. ad Pollucem, ix. 74; Welcker, Der Episclie Cyclus, p. 391.) [L. S.]
BREVIARIUM, or BREVIA’RIUM ALA-RICIA’NUM. Alaric the Second, king of the Visigoths, who reigned from a. d. 484 to A. d. 507, in the twenty-second year of his reign (a. d. 506) commissioned a body of jurists, probably Romans, to make a selection from the Roman laws and the Roman law writers, which should form a code for the use of his Roman subjects. The code, when made, was confirmed by the bishops and nobility at Aduris (Aire in Gascony); and a copy, signed by Anianus, the referendarius of Alaric, was sent to each comes, with an order to use no other law or legal form in his court (ut inforo tuo nulta alia lex neque juris formula prqferri vel recipi praesumatur}. The signature of Anianus was for the purpose of giving authenticity to the official copies of the code ; a circumstance which has been so far misunderstood that he has sometimes been considered as the compiler of the code, and it has been called Breviarium Aniani. This code has no peculiar name, so far as we know: it was called Lex Romana Visi-gothorum, and at a later period, frequently Lex Theodosii, from the title of the first and most important part of its contents. The name Breviarium, or Breviarium Alaricianum, does not appear before the sixteenth century.
The following are the contents of the Breviarium, with their order in the code: — 1. Codex Theo-dosianus, xvi books. 2. Novellae of Theodosius ii, Valentinian iii, Marcian, Majorian, Severus. 3. The Institutions of Gains, ii books. 4. Pauli Receptae Sententiae, v books. 5. Codex Grego-rianus, v books. 6. Codex Hermogenianus, i book. 7. Papinianus, lib. i. Responsorum.
The code was thus composed of two kinds of materials, imperial constitutions, which, both in the code itself and the commonitorium or notice prefixed to it, are called Leges ; and the writings of Roman jurists, which are called Jus. Both the Codex Gregorianus and Hermogenianus, being-compilations made without any legal authority, are included under the head of Jus. The selections are extracts, which are accompanied with an interpretation, except in the case of the Institutions of Gains ; as a general rule, the text, so far as it was adopted, was not altered. The Institutions of Gaius, however, are abridged or epitomised, and such alterations as were considered necessary for the time are introduced into the text: this part of the work required no interpretation, and accordingly it has none. There are passages in the epitome which are not taken from Gaius. (Gaius, iii. 127, ed. Goeschen.)
This code is of considerable value for the history of Roman law, as it contains several sources of the Roman law which are otherwise unknown, especially Paulus and the five first books of the Theo-dosian code. Since the discovery of the Institutions of Gaius, that part of this code is of less value.
The author of the Epitome of Gains in the Breviarium paid little attention to retaining the
