Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/234

that work of systematisation which was to form a framework for the loose threads of our ideas of legal justice and equity. It was not, indeed, as the law of the City-State of Rome that this systematisation was to dominate the world; but it was in the City-State that its roots were firmly fixed. The jus civile, or law of the cives Romani, was first formulated in the Twelve Tables drawn up by decemvirs in 451 B.C. and the following year; and we have sufficient fragments of these to gather something both of their contents and their method. The political advance which they indicate is very great. We here see the State for the first time definitely formulating the rules which were to govern the relations of men, — of privileged and unprivileged alike, — in regard to person and property; rules hitherto traditional in family or gens, or administered by the magistrate under no security for the consistency of his action. To these were probably added new ones adapted from the codes of other States, and especially from that of Solon. Custom, thus at once solidified and extended, became what we may justly call law. Law is a natural product of the true City-State, which demands something to give security to the life and dealings of all its members, — something which neither the savage, nor the member of a village community, nor even the gentilis within the infant State, has ever yet possessed in a formal and, so to speak, scientific shape; and this product of State-life the Romans were now developing with characteristic exactness. We see also that the rules laid down in these Tables