This work asks the question: What did Christianity do to build a civilization? In the present age, law has been used energetically to micro-manage human societies, values, and aspirations. But did l aw work that way in antiquity? This little book is some form of answer. It is a book on law and legal thought as it emerged in its formative ages of the Christian past; it asks what the ancient writers and theorists did w ith law and legal thought. It is part history, part philosophy, and more than anything else an intorduction to issues of law and legal adjudication in t he Patristic and Byzantine eras.