are facts too evidently brought about by motives of convenience and expediency and by the force of old association, to lead to any confusion in appreciating the proper place of the city.  Where there were to be found buildings suitable for the residence of the dux, and where was located the largest collection of individuals, was manifestly the most appropriate place for holding the courts and settling the disputes of the inhabitants of the whole civitas, and this formed a natural centre for the machinery of government.  But every inhabitant of the civitas had equal rights with the townsman proper, and, as in the old Greek [Greek:  polis], the most remote countryman dwelling on the borders of the civitas, if he possessed the franchise, was as much a citizen of Padua, Siena or Milan, as if he dwelt within the walls of the city which gave its name to the whole civitas.

A consideration of these facts brings out two important points, which I will briefly indicate before passing on to a little more detailed treatment of the powers and the duties of the judex.  In the first place it has been made clear that at the time under discussion nothing that could correctly be called a “municipal system” existed in Lombardy, and the city, as such, had no independent existence or independent relations with the state.  And secondly, it cannot but be manifest that the position that the city did occupy as actual, if not necessarily as legal, centre from which issued all the administrative functions of the district, the residence of the chief authority and the seat of his courts, would have a marked tendency to increase slowly, perhaps imperceptibly at first, the importance of its position at once in the civitas and in the state, and at the same time to improve the character of its inhabitants and in time increase their wealth.  That this ultimately came about the development of the later independent communal life is a proof, and the tardy steps by which this was attained but serve to show the difficulties consequent on so slight and so feeble a beginning.

The obscurity which promptly descends on the brain of the intelligent reader who endeavors to gain a clear idea of the state of society or of the administration of government in these early ages of Italian history, makes the careful student very skeptical of any precise presentation he may find of them, and causes him to be particularly cautious and proportionately diffident in making, himself, any very definite statements concerning them.  If he be a wise man and wish to make his investigation of some use to others, he frequently says “it seems probable,” and he particularly avoids mentioning dates which are fixed and immovable.  If this may be said of all matters not belonging simply to the narrative portions of history at this period, particularly true is it of the different functions attributed to various officers of local government, whose very titles we sometimes have to infer from their duties, and whose duties we often have to infer from their titles.