14.  II.  I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers

15.  People are in the habit of praising the Romans as a nation specially privileged in respect to jurisprudence, and of gazing with wonder on their admirable law as a mystical gift of heaven; presumably by way of specially excusing themselves for the worthlessness of their own legal system.  A glance at the singularly fluctuating and undeveloped criminal law of the Romans might show the untenableness of ideas so confused even to those who may think the proposition too simple, that a sound people has a sound law, and a morbid people an unsound.  Apart from the more general political conditions on which jurisprudence also, and indeed jurisprudence especially, depends, the causes of the excellence of the Roman civil law lie mainly in two features:  first, that the plaintiff and defendant were specially obliged to explain and embody in due and binding form the grounds of the demand and of the objection to comply with it; and secondly, that the Romans appointed a permanent machinery for the edictal development of their law, and associated it immediately with practice.  By the former the Romans precluded the pettifogging practices of advocates, by the latter they obviated incapable law-making, so far as such things can be prevented at all; and by means of both in conjunction they satisfied, as far as is possible, the two conflicting requirements, that law shall constantly be fixed, and that it shall constantly be in accordance with the spirit of the age.

16.  II.  II.  Relation of the Tribune to the Consul

17.  V. V. The Hegemony of Rome over Latium Shaken and Re-established

18.  Venus probably first appears in the later sense as Aphrodite on occasion of the dedication of the temple consecrated in this year (Liv. x. 31; Becker, Topographie, p. 472).

19.  II.  III.  Intrigues of the Nobility

20.  I. Vi.  Organization of the Army

21.  II.  III.  Increasing Powers of the Burgesses

22.  I. Vi. the Five Classes

23.  According to Roman tradition the Romans originally carried quadrangular shields, after which they borrowed from the Etruscans the round hoplite shield (-clupeus-, —­aspis—­), and from the Samnites the later square shield (-scutum-, —­thureos—­), and the javelin (-veru-) (Diodor.  Vat.  Fr. p. 54; Sallust, Cat. 51, 38; Virgil, Aen. vii. 665; Festus, Ep. v.  Samnites, p. 327, Mull.; and the authorities cited in Marquardt, Handb. iii. 2, 241).  But it may be regarded as certain that the hoplite shield or, in other words, the tactics of the Doric phalanx were imitated not from the Etruscans, but directly from the Hellenes, As to the -scutum-, that large, cylindrical, convex leather shield must certainly have taken the place of the flat copper -clupeus-, when the phalanx was broken up into maniples; but the undoubted derivation of the word from the Greek casts suspicion on the derivation of the thing itself from the Samnites.  From the Greeks the Romans derived also the sling (-funda- from —­sphendone—­). (like -fides- from —­sphion—­),(I.  XV.  Earliest Hellenic Influences).  The pilum was considered by the ancients as quite a Roman invention.