That rivalry was so heated that riots often broke out between them, and in one such riot, an estimated 30,000 people were killed. Thanks, Thought Bubble. But perhaps the most consistently Roman aspect of Byzantine society was that they followed Roman law. The Romans always prided themselves on being ruled by laws, not by men, and even though that wasn't actually the case after the 2nd century BCE, there's no question that the Eastern Roman Empire's codification of Roman laws was one of its great achievements. And much of the credit for that goes to the most famous Byzantine emperor, at least after Constantine, Justinian. I like your brooch, sir. In 533, Justinian published the Digest, an 800,000-word condensation of 1,528 Latin law books.