Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/55

41 philosophy was studied by the leading minds at Rome. Epicureanism helped to break down the superstitious fears of the old gods, but its ethics met with no marked response. The ethics of Stoicism, however, appealed to the moral sense of the nation. Law took on a new and profoundly ethical aspect. Its ultimate seat and authority was seen to be not in the founder of the city or in the will of changeable deities, but in the unchangeable nature of things. Cicero was pre-eminently the great interpreter of the Stoic theory to his countrymen. "I know no reason," says Maine, "why the law of the Romans should be superior to the laws of the Hindoos, unless the theory of Natural Law had given it a type of excellence different from the usual one. In this one exceptional instance simplicity and symmetry were kept before the eyes of a society whose influence on mankind was destined to be prodigious from other causes, as the characteristic of an ideal and absolutely perfect law." The law of Rome, as finally promulgated by the great jurists and handed down to posterity, was the product of a happy union of Roman practice and Greek theory. The Stoic notion of natural law furnished an ideal and ethical basis for the practical legal institutions of Rome, and in so doing gave them a breadth and depth of meaning that has made them of incalculable value in forwarding civilization. In the code of Justinian, the theory of the law of nature was preserved through the Middle Ages. Under the influence of the Church and of the Romanized cities the old law, as a body of practical rules, was kept in use by the Germanic conquerors.

It would be a most interesting historical study to trace the influence of the Stoic doctrine of law of nature embodied and preserved as it was in Roman law, to show how this doctrine affected the development of jurisprudence in France; how the alliance with the lawyers enabled the king to solidify and centralize the monarchy; how, later, Rousseau made of this jural doctrine a political doctrine which thus became the watchword of the French Revolution; how the same doctrine gave a