Dorotheus was a professor of jurisprudence in the law school of Berytus in Syria, and one of the three commissioners appointed by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I to draw up a book of Institutes, after the model of the Institutes of Gaius, which should serve as an introduction to the Digest (or Pandects) already completed. His colleagues were Tribonian and Theophilus; and their work was accomplished in 533. He also helped compile the second edition of the Codex Constitutionum (published in 534). In 542, as a commentary on the Digest, he published what is called the Index. Fragments of this commentary, which was in the Greek language, have been preserved in the Scholia appended to the body of law compiled by order of the emperor Basilius the Macedonian and his son Leo the Wise, in the 9th century, known as the Basilica. From this, it seems probable that the commentary of Dorotheus contained the substance of a course of lectures on the Digest delivered by him in the law school of Berytus, although it is not cast in a form so precisely didactic as the Index of Theophilus.

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