§ 1. The Unification and Extension of Roman Law.

The history of Roman Law begins for us with the traditions that have been preserved concerning the Roman Monarchy. The existence of a Monarchy such as that described for us by annalists like Livy and Dionysius, implies the existence of a consolidated State, with a central legislative and executive power and a tolerably uniform system of law. In the Monarchy, however, and even in the early Republic it seems that the system of law was not marked by perfect uniformity, since the two classes of Patricians and Plebeians, which made up the Roman State, appear to have been distinguished, not only by the possession of different political privileges, but also by the possession of different systems of customary law1. It is even possible that a further divergence of practice may have existed in the most primitive society, or societies, out of which the City and Monarchy of Rome developed—that a considerable amount of autonomy in legal relations may have existed in the Clans (Gentes) and Villages (Vici), out of which the earliest Rome was formed. The history of Roman law, from its beginning to its close, would thus be marked by a process of gradually increasing unification. First the customs of the Clans were merged in the customs of a State; but this State consisted of two classes, Patricians and Plebeians; and each of these classes seems to have had a customary law of its own. Then an attempt was made to create a uniform system; and this uniformity was probably secured by making patrician law approximate as closely as possible to plebeian—the law of the few to the law of the many. A further advance was made when Rome had become the mistress of Italy. Italian customs were made ultimately to conform to those of the leading State, and the free cities of Italy became the municipalities of Rome. Lastly, Rome had created an Empire. For a very long period she adopted the wise and cautious policy of recognizing, as far as possible, the local and tribal law of the cities and peoples under her control. The recognition of this local or tribal law was not, however, merely a symptom of the favourite Roman principle of non-interference. It was also a sign that the privileges of Romans and Italians were not possessed by provincials; for the conferment of Roman citizenship, or even of Latin rights, necessarily carried with it the use of the forms of Roman Private Law2. Hence, when a time came at which Rome was willing to raise States or individuals in the Provinces to a level with her own citizens, the law of Rome came to take the place of the territorial or tribal law of these political units. The process of a thorough imperial unification by means of a common system of Roman Private Law had begun.

§ 2. The Epochs in this process of Unification and Extension.

The dates of the three epochs which we have touched on can only be vaguely indicated. We have no knowledge of the year, or even of the century, when the smaller political units, out of which Rome was formed, became so thoroughly marshalled under the rule of a common government that the customs of the Clans were made to conform to the principles laid down and enforced by a single superior authority. For the second epoch—the period, that is, at which an attempt was made to secure a uniform system of law which would be binding equally on Patricians and Plebeians—tradition does supply a date, one, however, that has more than once been doubted by modern writers on Roman History and Law1. This traditional date is comprised in the years 451-448 b.c., years which the Romans believed to mark the creation of the Decemviral Commission and the publication of the Law of the Twelve Tables. The third tendency—that of the unification of Rome with Italy,—although it had begun to be felt in isolated cases from a very early period of Roman History, may be said to have received its final impulse at the close of the great war for Italian freedom, generally known as the Social war, in 89 b. c. The last epoch—that of imperial unification—may be said to have been ushered in by the accession of Caesar to supreme power in 49 b. c. It had not been closed even by the time of Gaius, about the middle of the second century a. d.; for, even at that late period the Eastern part of the Empire still abode by Eastern forms of law2. It may even be questioned whether the Edict of Caracalla, which is believed to have extended Roman citizenship to all the free inhabitants of that portion of the world that was ruled by Rome, between the years 212 and 217 a d., really eliminated all the local varieties of customary law. Local customs tend to die hard, and it was never in the spirit of the Roman Empire to suppress them. The legal unity of the Empire was always more strongly marked in the matter of Procedure than in the matter of Substantive Law. The processes of the Courts were the same for every Province at a time when the greatest varieties of customary law were recognized by these courts.

§ 3. Stages of Roman Legal History—The Clan and the Family—Evolution of individual rights.

We may now attempt to treat in greater detail the stages of Roman Legal History which we have outlined. The earliest stage—that marked by the independent or almost independent life of the Clan or Gens—is one for which, by the nature of the case, no definite historical evidence exists. The reality of such a life is merely an inference drawn from the characteristics of the Gens as it appears before us in the historical period. These characteristics seem to prove that the Gens is not a really primitive institution, but a late and advanced stage in the social development of the Latin races; but, on the other hand, they may show that it was in many respects a more primitive unit than the State; that is, that it exercised rights and duties which were ultimately exercised by the State. No political society worthy of the name can deal with Clans as the subjects of rights; it can deal only with Families or Individuals. Hence, if the Roman Gens ever lived a strong corporate life, the authority of the Roman State must in those days have been weak.

The organization of the Gens was based on the patriarchal idea in its extreme form: that is, on the conception that relationship is only binding when it can be traced through the male line. And this is the fact which seems to prove that the Gens marks a late and mature stage in the development of Latin societies; for the patriarchal idea is not one that is readily grasped by the mind of primitive man. Yet, late as the Gens is when considered in reference to the prehistoric development of the Latin race, it perhaps possessed, before the very dawn of history, a unity and power of its own, of which but pale reflections survive in the historical period. In historical times the only test of unity was the common name borne by the Gentiles1; the chief signs of corporate action were their guardianship of the insane and their reversionary right of guardianship over women and children2 — powers which the Gentiles must have exercised by delegating their authority to a personal representative. The further right which they possessed in later times, of succeeding to intestate inheritances in the last resort1, was perhaps a right possessed by individual members of the corporation rather than by the corporation itself. But a corporate activity far greater than this has been suspected for earlier times. There is indirect evidence that all Private Land (Ager Privatus) was at one time owned by the Gentes, not by families or individuals2, and the view that the primitive Roman Senate was in some way representative of the Gentes is in accordance with the belief of Roman antiquity3. The fact that the primitive Roman State was in many ways conditioned by its clan organization seems to be certain. As the State grew stronger, it substituted the Family for the Clan. Between the two there is only a difference of degree. The Family (Familia) is the aggregate of the members of a household under a common head, the Paterfamilias; whereas the Gens is the aggregate of all individuals who bear a common name and who, therefore, if their ancestry could be traced in the male line through all its stages, would be found to be the descendants of some ultimate common ancestor. But the Familia is a far smaller, and therefore a far less powerful, unit than the Gens. It cannot so effectively dominate the State or impede its activities4. Again, the heads of families are many in number; the heads of the Gentes (who must have existed at the time when the Gens was the important unit) were necessarily few. The State which deals with families deals with a multitude of individuals, not with an oligarchy representing the interests of a number of corporations. The conception of individual rights, in their modern sense, was, it is true, never fully recognized in Roman Private Law. It was impeded by the Patria Potestas—the life-long power of the father over the son. But much was ultimately done to lessen the rigour of this patriarchal rule; and the principles of Roman Law were finally extended to races which knew nothing of the Patria Potestas. This law ultimately gave the most perfect expression hitherto witnessed by the world of rights which were both universal and individual. The existence of the Empire gave Rome the power, possessed in as high a degree by no other State, of dealing with the individual on universal lines, because she was not hampered by the barriers between man and man thrown up by separate national institutions.

§ 4. Early Religious Law (Fas)—The Leges Regiae—The Secularization of Law.

A process, which runs parallel with that which we have just described, is the process by which Roman Law came to be secularized; the process, that is, by which human were gradually substituted for divine sanctions. The customary law of a primitive society is either identical with, or developed from, some form of belief which implies the omnipresence of the gods and their detailed interest and activity in human affairs. In primitive Rome the pleading (actio) of the litigant in a civil suit is a religious chant, every word and cadence of which must be learnt from the priest; the wager (sacramentum), by which the process is stated, is a gift to a temple, and is probably conceived as an atonement for the involuntary perjury of the man who loses his case1; the penalties of the criminal law are means of expiating the anger of the gods, the severest form of atonement being the sacrifice of the sinner on the altar of the deity whom he has offended2. Rome in the historical period still preserves many traces of these beliefs of her infancy. They are found in the respect for the Auspices, in the conservatism which maintained the cumbrous forms of the old pleadings (actiones) and the custody of these forms by the Pontifical College; in the varied methods by which crime or sin is punished, some offences being reserved wholly for the secular courts, others being visited by the judgments of the Pontifical College, others again being subject to the milder chastisement of the Censor before he performs the religious rite of Purification (Lustratio). But the belief of the Romans themselves was that, in the very earliest stages of their recorded or imagined history, the primitive epoch of complete subservience to religious forms, if it ever existed, had been already passed, and that even in the time of the Kings something approaching a clear line could be drawn between the functions of Religious Law (Fas) and those of Secular Law (Jus). At the close of the history of the Republic there could be shown, in contradistinction to the great secular code of the Twelve Tables, a collection of religious ordinances, believed to be even more ancient than this code, and known as the Laws of the Kings (Leges Regiae)3. These laws are not represented as having formed a code, but merely a compilation. They were believed to be regal ordinances, issued by different Kings, which had been collected in the early days of the Republic by a Pontiff named Papirius1. It was held that they had been publicly exhibited in Rome, and were restored, like the Twelve Tables, after the burning of Rome by the Gauls (390 b. c)2. At the end of the Republic the compilation was edited, perhaps to some extent revised, by a scholar named Granius Flaccus, who is believed to have been a contemporary of Caesar3; but there is no reason for supposing that Flaccus introduced any essential alteration in the tenor of the ordinances. These ordinances, in the form in which they have been preserved to us, bear the strongest internal marks of their genuineness. Some of the provisions which they contain are quite prehistoric and could never have been valid at any period of the history of the Republic. Others deal with purely religious observances, which may belong to any date, but may be as early as the city of Rome itself. The Royal Laws, in fact, contain a series of ordinances, dealing with social, moral and religious life, such as may have been issued over a long period of time by the College of Pontiffs. It is not likely that all of these rules really go back to the epoch of the Kings; but many of them must do so, for they reflect an extremely primitive stage of culture and religious belief. In fact, one of the most surprising features of the Royal Laws is their lack of significance for the ordinary current of Roman life, as it was lived in the historical period. Where they are not a dead letter, they refer only to slight and exceptional contingencies, to the bare outline of the political life of the State and to the faintly defined structure of its hierarchical organization; whereas the Law of the Twelve Tables is a great living force, which pervades the whole of Roman business life. The Royal Laws reflect on the whole the rule of Fas; the Twelve Tables almost entirely the rule of Jus. A comparison of the former compilation with the latter code, in regard to their respective influences, exhibits more effectively than any other evidence could do the triumph of secular over religious law even in the early period of the Republic.

§ 5. Jus—Its different forms as exhibited in Procedure.

The counterpart to the rule of Fas is the rule of Jus. Jus seems originally to have meant ‘That which is fitting’4, and the word never necessarily conveys the implication, contained in the word Law, that the thing it describes is the result of enactment by a Sovereign. It conveys rather the idea of valid custom, to which any citizen can appeal, and which is recognized, and can be enforced by, a human authority. Jus is a nugatory thing, a vain abstraction, until it can be realized; it is a thing recognized only in practice; and so indissolubly were the ideas of Right and Satisfaction connected with one another in the minds of the Romans that they used the same word ‘Jus’ for Right and for Court1. This association of ideas gives us the clue to the fact that the only possible method of distinguishing between the different kinds of Jus is by appealing to Procedure. In early societies, where there is no science of Jurisprudence, the only way in which the distinctions between different kinds of law—public and private, civil and criminal—can be exhibited, is by pointing to the fact that different kinds of mechanism have been created for satisfying different kinds of claims. Thus the characteristics of private law are those of a civil suit. Here the action can be brought only by the injured party or his representative, the satisfaction recovered belongs to the injured party, the Court which gives the satisfaction is composed of some arbitrator or judge (arbiter or judex) chosen by the consent of the parties, but approved by the judicial magistrate who represents the State. Criminal Law may similarly be defined in terms of Criminal Procedure. Here the wrong done is regarded as inflicted, not merely on the individual injured, but through him on the State. The State, therefore, will not depend on the initiative of the injured individual to undertake the prosecution. It can either be taken up by any citizen, or is regarded as the peculiar duty of a magistrate. The magistrate is often both prosecutor and judge. The defendant has no voice in the selection of the Court. The Court consisted, in the earlier procedure at Rome which never became wholly extinct during the Republic, of a magistrate representing the State, or of the State itself in the form of the Sovereign Assembly of the People; at a later period, of a select body of Judices with a President (Quaesitor), both Judges and President being created by statute. The satisfaction recovered from the defendant in such a trial, if it takes the form of a fine, belongs not to the aggrieved individual but to the State; if it assumes the form of punishment which is not pecuniary, such punishment is inflicted by the State. The third class of occasions on which the State intervenes to correct a wrong or to chasten an individual, is that governed by the rules of Administrative Law2. The procedure springing from this Law has analogies both to civil and to criminal jurisdiction. Administrative jurisdiction has as its object either the enforcement of a personal service to the State on an individual, or the exaction of a debt which he owes to the State. The obligation to service is generally enforced by a fine imposed by the magistrate. But whether what is demanded by the State takes the form of personal service or a pecuniary debt, the characteristic of Administrative jurisdiction at an early period of Roman History is that the magistrate who represents the State has a double character. He is not only prosecutor or plaintiff but also judge. This principle, however, was eventually modified. If the fine imposed exceeded a certain limit, an appeal to the People was allowed1; and, later still, the penalty might be sought either by a magistrate or a common informer before a civil court1. When a debt to the State was the object of dispute, the custom may eventually have been established that the magistrate should not himself judge, but should appoint for this purpose a panel of those assessors of debts or damages who were known as Recuperatores2.

The question as to what particular cases shall fall under each of these three heads of Civil, Criminal and Administrative Law is one that is answered differently by different political societies; and Rome herself gave different replies to this question at various periods of her history. But we know of no period in the life of Rome when the distinction between these three types of Law and Procedure was not clearly grasped, and expressed by the higher judicial authorities, who were at Rome in a very real sense the makers of law.

§ 6. The ultimate sources of Jus—The Monarchy and the Early Republic.

The problem of the ultimate source and sanction of Jus was not one that troubled the Roman to any appreciable degree at any period of history. He was content to regard it as the product of Custom assisted by Interpretation. At a later period he supplemented it by acts of Legislation; but, even when he did so, he was much less concerned with the words of the enactment than with the manner in which these words were interpreted. Scarcely any people has had less of a gift, or natural inclination for, scientific legislation or the formation of a Code. The Roman’s dependence on authority and skilled interpretation was, therefore, great; and this authority and power of interpretation are believed to have been represented, in the earliest times, by the King and the College of Pontifices. Justice could only be obtained by a litigant who knew the formularies of action, precise verbal accuracy in which was necessary for the successful conduct of a suit1. But this knowledge could be obtained only from the King and his Pontiffs. The King, too, must have given the ruling in law which determined what form of action should be employed2. Even at this early period the private Judex or Arbiter may often have been used for the final settlement of a suit3; but the King must have assisted in his appointment; and his judgment must have been conditioned by the preceding form of action which the King and the Pontiffs had thought appropriate to the suit.

The change from Monarchy to Republic could have made little difference in the manner in which the law was revealed to the Roman litigant, except in so far as this change may have increased the power of the College of Pontiffs. The annual tenure of the consulship, and the fact that each occupant of this office was hampered by a colleague, prevented the new magistracy, which was supposed to give the forms of Jus, from exercising over its skilled advisers the authority which had been once wielded by the King; and the patrician aristocracy, each member of which might be a consul or a pontiff, must now have attained a solidarity which it had never known before. The tendency of this aristocracy was to close up its ranks and to assert a monopoly, not only of office, but of knowledge of the forms of law.

§ 7. Patricians and Plebeians.

Had Rome been a homogeneous community, there would perhaps have been no agitation for the revelation of the principles of law which underlay the forms of procedure, and there would therefore have been no tendency towards an early codification. But Rome was composed of two communes, not of one. There was a Plebs within the Populus; and this Plebs possessed a solidarity which gave it the means of lifting up its voice in a demand, not for power, but for the protection of legal rights, and for the knowledge which was essential to that protection. The origin of the Plebs is wholly unknown. The favourite assertion of modern writers, that the Plebeians were a class which had emerged from a condition of clientship to the Patricians, does very little to solve the problem of the origin of the former class, except in so far as it suggests that some of the Plebeians were inhabitants of conquered cities that had been deported to Rome, and that others were voluntary sojourners from distant cities who were protected by the government and the patrician clans. But it seems impossible that causes such as these could have led to the creation of a mass of men that appears in early Roman history as forming the bulk of the community; and it is possible that further evidence (archaeological and ethnological) may show that the distinction between Patricians and Plebeians is one based on race, and that the existence of the Patricians as a governing class is the result of the conquest of a native race by bands of immigrant wanderers1. Throughout Roman law there is a curious persistence of dual forms for the attainment of the same end which may be a survival of two distinct systems of customary law possessed by different peoples, the conquerors and the conquered. Thus we have the Sponsio side by side with the Nexum, marriage by Confarreatio side by side with marriage by Usus or Coemptio, the testament in the Comitia Calata side by side with the testament ‘per aes et libram.’ The procedure ‘by the copper and the scales,’ in the manifold forms which it assumes, seems to be especially a characteristic of the popular law of the commons. The exclusion of the Plebeians from the magistracy and the priesthood, and the denial to them of the right of Conubium with Patricians, may also point in the direction of a fundamental racial distinction between the two classes. But the disabilities consequent on this racial distinction, if we suppose it to have existed, were by no means limited to the domain of public rights. They pervaded the whole of Roman life to such an extent that there is considerable justification for the view that the early condition of the Plebeian was very like that of the client. In the first place, the Patricians maintained that they alone formed Gentes, and the condition of being a member of a Gens, or Gentilis, was that the man who made the claim should be able to point to a perfectly free ancestry2. In this claim of the Patricians we therefore have the implication that the ancestors of the Plebeians were not free. In all respects but this, the Plebeians formed Clans just like the Patricians. A group of Plebeians who bore a common name formed a Stirps, but this Stirps was supposed to be a mere offshoot of some patrician Gens on which it was held to be dependent. It possessed no independent rights of its own. A group of Plebeians who could trace their ancestry back to a common head were called Agnati; but these Agnati had not the rights of inheritance, or perhaps the other family rights, possessed by the Gentiles. The rights of plebeian Agnati were recognized by the Twelve Tables; but this was perhaps the first recognition that they gained. In the second place, of the two rights which were subsequently considered as forming the minimum conditions of citizenship, the Jus Conubii was, we know, not possessed at all by Plebeians, and it is probable that they possessed the Jus Commercii in a very imperfect form. We cannot, it is true, point to a time when no Plebeian could conclude a contract, or bring an action, unless, like a client, he acted through a patron. But it is probable that in early times he had a very limited capacity for controlling land; that he held the ground, which he worked for himself, merely on sufferance (Precario), and not in virtue of his civic right (ex Jure Quiritium)1. This seems proved by the fact that he was not originally liable to service in the legions2: for there can be little doubt that such service was a burden imposed on landowners3. It seems that the one great condition which led to the rise of the Plebeians as a power in the State was the recognition of their rights as independent holders of land. This recognition was accorded because their services were required as soldiers in the legions and as tax-payers. They could now hold and dispose of Res Mancipi; that is, those kinds of property which were assessed at the Census (Res Censui Censendo)4 and which, as being liable to such assessment, required peculiar methods of transfer as evidence of ownership. This change must have preceded or accompanied the great epoch of reform which is associated with the name of Servius Tullius.

§ 8. Acquisition of voting rights by Plebeians—Assemblies of the Populus and of the Plebs.

When the army was made the basis of the new Comitia Centuriata, the wealthier Plebeians who were members of the army gained a vote; and the Comitia Curiata, originally patrician, must soon have come to admit members of the Plebs. But this voting power did little good to the class as a whole. Its true strength lay in its military organization. The first secession was an incident in a campaign; and it is not surprising that the officers whom the Plebeians appointed to protect their persons against the patrician magistrates, bore the military name of Tribuni. The creation of the Tribunate gave the Plebs a political organization, and was the starting-point of that dualism which runs through the whole of the Roman constitution—a dualism expressed in the distinction between the Comitia of the People and the Concilium of the Plebs, between Lex and Plebiscitum, between Magistratus Populi and Magistratus Plebis, between the Imperium of the one and the Sacrosanctitas of the other. The tribunes, however, could offer only personal assistance to outraged individuals, and though they proved a potent channel for the petitions of the Plebs as a whole, they were a very ineffective means of protecting the private rights of individual members of this order. Effective protection was in any case impossible until a fuller light had been thrown on the question what the rights to be protected actually were. Hence the demand for the publication of the principles of the law on which the jurisdiction of the patrician magistrates was based.

§ 9. Unification of the Law by means of the Twelve Tables.

The story of the creation of the Decemvirate and the formation of the Code of the Twelve Tables, which has come down to us in a highly picturesque and legendary shape, presents us with the picture, first of a prolonged agitation of ten years (462-452 b. c.) maintained by the tribunes of the Plebs, then of a commission sent to gain knowledge of Hellenic codes, next of the appointment of two successive boards of Decemvirs for the years 451, 450 b. c., and finally of the ratification of the Code by the Comitia Centuriata and of its publication, in its completed form, by the consuls of 448 b. c1 The Greek influence on the Code2, although slight, is undeniable, because it was unavoidable. It may not have been gathered, in the way affirmed by tradition, by the appointment of a commission to inspect the systems of law of different Hellenic states; but it was, at the least, an inevitable result of the prolonged influence of the civilization of Magna Graecia3, to which Rome had been subject from the days of her infancy—an influence which successively moulded her army, her coinage, her commerce and her literature. Again no State, however self-centred, could dream of undertaking such an enterprise as a written system of law without glancing at similar work which had already been accomplished by neighbouring cities. But, in spite of the fact that some of its outline and a few of its ideas may have been borrowed from Greek sources, the Law of the Twelve Tables is thoroughly Roman both in expression and in matter. The form of expression is, it is true, not that of later Roman legislation—complicated, technical, obscure. Had it been so, the Twelve Tables could scarcely have survived. It was the form that was current in the verbal juristic maxims of this and a later period—brief, gnomic, rhythmic and imperative1. As to the matter, that was conditioned by the task which the Decemvirs had to perform—a task which they accomplished with an astonishing degree of success. Their object was to make a common law for Roman society considered as a whole. It was no business of theirs to abolish patrician privileges or to remove the peculiarities of patrician ceremonial; but they had to find a system of Jus which would be equally valid for all Romans; and this they naturally found in the customary law of the mass of the people; that is, of the Plebs. They were forced to recognize a social disability of the Plebs, as exemplified in the absence of Conubium with Patricians2; for to remove it would have been an alteration of the Constitution as well as an infringement of patrician rights. But how completely they ignored the existence of the Plebs as a separate political community is shown by the fact that the tribunes do not seem to have been mentioned in the law at all. The assumption probably was that the publication of the Code should render the Tribunate unnecessary; and this it might have done, had the patrician government lived up to its promises.

The law of the Twelve Tables, as the ‘body of the whole of Roman law’ (‘corpus omnis Romani juris’) and the ‘fountain of all public and private law’ (‘fons omnis publici privatique juris’)—designations both of which are applied to it by Livy3—contained ordinances on all the three branches of Jus, civil. criminal and constitutional. In the matter of civil law, we find regulations as to marriage and family relations, inheritance, testamentary disposition, debt and usury. The marriage recognized was that known as the result of usus—a contract, that is, which was concluded by consent and strengthened by prescription4. It was ordained that the threefold sale of a son by his father should issue in the freedom of the son5: although whether the Twelve Tables made this form of emancipation the basis of adoption is uncertain. The manumission of slaves who had been left free by testament, on the condition of purchasing their freedom, was also facilitated6. Recognition was given to testamentary disposition as performed ‘per aes et libram’1; while, in the matters of intestate inheritance and guardianship, the rights of the Agnati, common to Plebeians and Patricians, were regarded as prior to those of the Gentiles2 The harsh law of debt, which was a result at once of freedom of contract and of the very severe view which ancient societies take of the defaulting debtor, was maintained; the Judicatus still became the bondsman of his creditor3, but now (perhaps for the first time), all the stages of the process of execution were published to the world, the rights of the creditor were defined, the chances of escape open to the debtor were accurately described. Loans on interest were permitted; but the maximum rate of interest was fixed at ‘unciarium foenus’4