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.