Anastasius (Jurist)

Anastasius was a Graeco-Roman jurist, apparently from the city of Dara, who lived in the fifth or sixth century and was known as an interpreter of the Digest, the Roman compendium of laws. His opinion is cited in the later Basilika, on one occasion set against that of Stephanus of Byzantium. Little in his surviving fragments fixes the century in which he worked, though the classical scholar Reitz considered it certain that he was a contemporary of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. The historian Procopius records that an Anastasius from Dara, who had put down an attempted usurpation in his native city and had a high reputation for intelligence, was sent as an envoy to the Persian shah Khosrau I in 540, was at first detained against his will, and was returned to Justinian only after Khosrau destroyed the city of Sura.