you before the tribunal of the praetor to debate our right at the place in question.”  The judge orders them to go to the place.  “Before these witnesses here present, this is your road to the place; go!” The litigants take a few steps as if to go thither, and this is the symbol of the journey.  A witness says to them, “Return,” and the journey is regarded as completed.  Each of the two presents a clod of earth, the symbol of the field.  Thus the trial commences;[164] then the judge alone hears the case.  Like all primitive peoples, the Romans comprehended well only what they actually saw; the material acts served to represent to them the right that could not be seen.

=The Formalism of Roman Law.=—­The Romans scrupulously respected their ancient forms.  In justice, as in religion, they obeyed the letter of the law, caring nothing for its sense.  For them every form was sacred and ought to be strictly applied.  In cases before the courts their maxim was:  “What has already been pronounced ought to be the law.”  If an advocate made a mistake in one word in reciting the formula, his case was lost.  A man entered a case against his neighbor for having cut down his vines:  the formula that he ought to use contained the word “arbor,” he replaced it with the word “vinea,” and could not win his case.

This absolute reverence for the form allowed the Romans some strange accommodations.  The law said that if a father sold his son three times, the son should be freed from the power of the father; when, therefore, a Roman wished to emancipate his son, he sold him three times in succession, and this comedy of sale sufficed to emancipate him.

The law required that before beginning war a herald should be sent to declare it at the frontier of the enemy.  When Rome wished to make war on Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, who had his kingdom on the other side of the Adriatic, they were much embarrassed to execute this formality.  They hit on the following:  a subject of Pyrrhus, perhaps a deserter, bought a field in Rome; they then assumed that this territory had become territory of Epirus, and the herald threw his javelin on this land and made his solemn declaration.  Like all other immature peoples, the Romans believed that consecrated formulas had a magical virtue.

=Jurisprudence.=—­The Law of the Twelve Tables and the laws made after them were brief and incomplete.  But many questions presented themselves that had no law for their solution.  In these embarrassing cases it was the custom at Rome to consult certain persons who were of high reputation for their knowledge of questions of law.  These were men of eminence, often old consuls or pontiffs; they gave their advice in writing, and their replies were called the Responses of the Wise.  Usually these responses were authoritative according to the respect had for the sages.  The emperor Augustus went further:  he named some of them whose responses should have the force of law.  Thus Law began to be a science and the men versed in law formulated new rules which became obligatory.  This was Jurisprudence.