Beacon Lights of History, Volume 03 | Page 7

but under the
forms of legislation. Nor did they attempt to subvert laws which did not
interfere with their own political power. What is called jurisprudence
they even improved, as that later imperial despot Napoleon gave a code
to the nation he ruled. It is this science of jurisprudence, for which the
Romans had a genius, that gives them their highest claim to be ranked
among the benefactors of mankind. They created legal science. Its aim
was justice,--equity in the relations between man and man. This was
the pride of the Roman world, even under the rule of tyrants and
madmen, and this has survived all the calamities of fifteen hundred
years. The Roman laws--founded by the Republic, but symmetrically
completed by the Empire--have more powerfully affected the interests
of civilization than have the philosophy and arts of Greece. Roman
jurisprudence was not perfectly developed until five hundred years after
the Christian era, when Justinian consolidated it into the Code, the
Pandects, and the Institutes. The classical jurists, like Gaius, Ulpian,
and Paulus, may have laid the foundation, but the superstructure was
raised under the auspices of the imperial despots.
The earliest code of Roman laws was called the Twelve Tables, framed
from the report of the commissioners sent to Athens and other Greek
States, to collect what was most useful in their legal systems. The laws
of the Twelve Tables were the basis of all the Roman laws, civil and
religious. But the edicts of the praetors, who were the great equity
judges as well as the common-law magistrates, proclaimed certain
changes which custom and the practice of the courts had introduced;
and these, added to the leges populi, or laws proposed by the consul
and passed by the centuries, the plebiscita, or laws proposed by the
tribunes and passed by the tribes, and the _senatus consulta,_ or decrees

of the senate, gradually swelled the laws to a great number. Three
thousand engraved plates of brass containing these various laws were
deposited in the capitol.
Subtleties and fictions were in the course of litigations introduced by
the lawyers to defeat the written statutes, and jurisprudence became
complicated as early as the time of Cicero. Even the opinions of
eminent lawyers were adopted by the legal profession as authoritative,
and were recognized by the courts. The evils of a complicated
jurisprudence were so evident in the seventh century of the city, that Q.
Mucius Scaevola, a great lawyer, when consul, published a scientific
elaboration of the civil law. Cicero studied law under him, and his
contemporaries, Varus and Aelius Gallus, wrote learned treatises, from
which extracts appear in the Digest made under the Emperor Justinian,
528 A.D. Julius Caesar contemplated a complete revision of the laws,
but did not live long enough to carry out his intentions. His legislation,
so far as he directed his mind to it, was very just. Among other laws
established by him was one which ordained that creditors should accept
lands as payment for their outstanding debts, according to the value
determined by commissioners. In his time the relative value of money
had changed, and was greatly diminished. The most important law of
Augustus, deserving of all praise, was that which related to the
manumission of slaves; but he did not interfere with the social relations
of the people after he had deprived them of political liberty. He once
attempted, by his Lex Julia, to counteract the custom which then
prevailed, of abstaining from legal marriage and substituting
concubinage instead, by which the free population declined; but this
attempt to improve the morals of the people met with such opposition
from the tribes and centuries that the next emperor abolished popular
assemblies altogether, which Augustus had feared to do. The senate in
the time of the emperors, composed chiefly of lawyers and magistrates,
and entirely dependent upon them, became the great fountain of law.
By the original constitution the people were the source of power, and
the senate merely gave or refused its approbation to the laws proposed;
but under the emperors the comitia, or popular assemblies, disappeared,
and the senate passed decrees which had the force of laws, subject to
the veto of the Emperor. It was not until the time of Septimus Severus

and Caracalla (second century A.D.) that the legislative action of the
senate ceased, and the edicts and rescripts of emperors took the place of
all legislation.
The golden age of Roman jurisprudence was from the birth of Cicero to
the reign of the Emperor Alexander Severus, 222 A.D.; before this
period it was an occult science, confined to praetors, pontiffs, and
patrician lawyers. But in the latter days of the republic law became the
fashionable study of Roman youth, and eminent masters arose. The first
great lawyer who left behind him important