Право и власт в Предисловието към Еклогата: Славянски езикови проекции
Law and Power in the Preamble to the Ecloga: Slavonic Linguistic Projections

Summary/Abstract: Based on the Y. N. Shchapov’ s critical edition of the complete Slavonic translation of the Ecloga, and the L. Burgmann’s edition of the Greek original, the article aims at analyzing some linguistic data from the Preamble to the Ecloga. The author attempts to answer the question what factors determine its popularity in the 9th –10th period of the written legal culture among Slavs, provided that the Byzantine Ecloga was the work of the iconoclastic emperors. Similarities for its application in the peripheral areas and outside territories of the Empire, where compilations appeared, are considered. The plausible hypothesis of Old Bulgarian translation from tsar Symeon’ epoch (896–927) is not coincidental but largely due to its crediting with the basic ideological concepts for the dependence between God’s power, the earthly ruler and the law, developed in the Preamble. Therefore it is considered to be a political treatise. Lexical data confirm this: presence of composita revealing the all-encompassing moral essence of Christian notions of good, justice and statehood; institutional and administrative terms; biblical quotations (10 from the Old and 4 from the New Testament). The program character of the Preamble justifies the perception of the Ecloga not only as a legal text, but as an ideological platform of power and new Christian legal-ethical system. Basic concepts of legal language reveal the cultural implication of law.

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