The old law required that a man to become a proprietor must perform a complicated ceremony of sale; the praetor recognized that it was sufficient to have paid the price of the sale and to be in possession of the property.  Thus the Law of Nations invaded and gradually superseded the Civil Law.

="Written Reason."=—­It was especially under the emperors that the new Roman law took its form.  The Antonines issued many ordinances (edicts) and re-scripts (letters in which the emperor replied to those who consulted him).  Jurisconsults who surrounded them assisted them in their reforms.  Later, at the beginning of the third century, under the bad emperors as under the good, others continued to state new rules and to rectify the old.  Papinian, Ulpian, Modestinus, and Paullus were the most noted of these lawyers; their works definitively fixed the Roman law.

This law of the third century has little resemblance to the old Roman law, so severe on the weak.  The jurisconsults adopt the ideas of the Greek philosophers, especially of the Stoics.  They consider that all men have the right of liberty:  “By the law of nature all men are born free,” which is to say that slavery is contrary to nature.  They also admit that a slave could claim redress even against his master, and that the master, if he killed his slave, should be punished as a murderer.  Likewise they protect the child against the tyranny of the father.

It is this new law that was in later times called Written Reason.  In fact, it is a philosophical law such as reason can conceive for all men.  And so there remains no longer an atom of the strict and gross law of the Twelve Tables.  The Roman law which has for a long time governed all Europe, and which today is preserved in part in the laws of several European states is not the law of the old Romans.  It is constructed, on the contrary, of the customs of all the peoples of antiquity and the maxims of Greek philosophers fused together and codified in the course of centuries by Roman magistrates and jurisconsults.

FOOTNOTES: 

[157] Sometimes called the Age of Cicero.

[158] Lucretius.—­ED.

[159] One of the most noted, the plea for Milo, was written much later.  Cicero at the time of the delivery was distracted and said almost nothing.

[160] See the “Dialogue of the Orators,” attributed to Tacitus.

[161] The word “rhetor” signified in Greek simply orator; the Romans used the word in a mistaken sense to designate the men who made a profession of speaking.

[162] The same reserve must be maintained with regard to the arts as to the literature.  The builders of the Roman monuments were not Romans, but provincials, often slaves; the only Roman would be the master for whom the slaves worked.

[163] This estimate is too liberal. 1,500,00 is probably nearer the truth.  See Friedlaender, Sittengeschichte Roms, i. 25.—­ED.