brated as the most ancient legislators; and each of them claims his peculiar part in the threefold division of Jurisprudence.[1] The laws of marriage, the education of children, and the authority of parents, which may seem to draw their origin from nature itself, are ascribed to the untutored wisdom of Romulus. The law of nations and of religious worship, which Numa introduced, was derived from his nocturnal converse with the nymph Egeria. The civil law is attributed to the experience of Servius; he balanced the rights and fortunes of the seven classes of citizens, and guarded, by fifty new regulations, the observance of contracts and the punishment of crimes. The state, which he had inclined towards a democracy, was changed by the last Tarquin into lawless despotism; and, when the kingly office was abolished, the patricians engrossed the benefits of freedom. The royal laws became odious or obsolete; the mysterious deposit was silently preserved by the priests and nobles; and, at the end of sixty years, the citizens of Rome still complained that they were ruled by the arbitrary sentence of the magistrates. Yet the positive institutions of the kings had blended themselves with the public and private manners of the city; some fragments of that venerable jurisprudence[2] were compiled by the diligence of antiquarians;[3] and above twenty texts still speak the rudeness of the Pelasgic idiom of the Latins.[4]
- ↑ This threefold division of the law was applied to the three Roman kings by Justus Lipsius (Opp. tom. iv. p. 279); is adopted by Gravina (Origines Juris Civilis, p. 28, edit. Lips. 1737); and is reluctantly admitted by Mascou, his German editor.
- ↑ The most ancient Code or Digest was styled Jus Papirianum, from the first compiler, Papirius, who flourished somewhat before or after the Regifugium (Pandect. l. i. tit. ii.). The best judicial critics, even Bynkershoek (tom. i. p. 284, 285), and Heincccius (Hist. J. C. R. l. i. c. 16, 17, and Opp. tom. iii. sylloge iv. p. 1-8), give credit to this tale of Pomponius, without sufficiently adverting to the value and rarity of such a monument of the third century of the illiterate city. I much suspect that the Caius Papirius, the Pontifex Maximus, who revived the laws of Numa (Dionys. Hal. l. iii. p. 171 [c. 26]), left only an oral tradition; and that the Jus Papirianum of Granius Flaccus (Pandect. l. i, tit. xvi. leg. 144) was not a commentary, but an original work, compiled in the time of Cæsar (Censorin. de Die Natali, l. iii. p. 13. Duker de Latinitate J. C. p. 157). [The inference from the passage in Dionysius seems to be that the Jus Papirianum was compiled under Tarquinius Superbus. The leges regiae were abolished by a lex tribunicia. Yet some of them were in force in B.C. 367. Cp. Livy, 6, 1.]
- ↑ A pompous, though feeble, attempt to restore the original is made in the Histoire de la jurisprudence Romaine of Terrasson, p. 22-72, Paris, 1750, in folio: a work of more promise than performance.
- ↑ In the year 1444, seven or eight tables of brass were dug up between Cortona and Gubbio. A part of these, for the rest is Etruscan, represents the primitive state of the Pelasgic letters and language, which are ascribed by Herodotus to that district of Italy (l. i. c. 56, 57, 58); though this difficult passage may be
