Page:Roman public life (IA romanpubliclife00greeiala).pdf/231

 his own edict. In the shaping of the edictal rules the mere fact of publicity in a community so legally gifted as that of the Romans must have sufficed to keep the magistrate within the bounds of prudence; when he was conscious of little legal training, the assistance of eminent jurisconsults must have frequently been called in.

The edict is the source of most of our modern Roman law; the titles of Justinian's Digest are often commentaries on its rubrics excerpted from the writings of the scientific jurists, and that it should become the prototype of the world's law was only natural when we consider the way in which it was built up. It was not only the collective work of generations of gifted men, who were fortunately not professing lawyers, but it was the outcome of an adjustment of Roman law first with that of Italy and then with that of the provinces. The beginnings of a recognition of a "law of the civilised world" (jus gentium) must be older than the institution of the praetor peregrinus, since for more than a century the praetor urbanus had been issuing edicts not merely for cives but also for peregrini; but, when a separate comprehensive edict was issued for peregrini, equity found a more systematic expression, and its reaction on the comparatively rigid forms of the urban edicts was necessarily great; but the power of this reaction was possibly even surpassed by that of the provincial edict (edictum provinciale), issued originally by the foreign praetors and then by the proconsuls and propraetors in each of Rome's dependencies.

The connexion of the praetors with criminal jurisdiction was, apart from the rare occurrence of a special judicial commission, due to the growth of the standing courts. These ''quaestiones perpetuae or judicia publica'' were to a large extent modelled on the civil procedure by which compensation was exacted through a court of recuperatores. Hence the praetors seemed their most appropriate presidents, and the size of the college was, as we have seen, increased by Sulla to meet the growing number of these courts. For criminal jurisdiction six praetors were available, whose provinces were possibly determined by the Senate and were certainly distributed amongst the designated magistrates