Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/353

 10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 339 demand prevailed, after a long struggle, in the creation of the Decemvirs, who were appointed to draft a body of gen- eral law for the nation. This draft was enacted as a Statute, and became thenceforth, in the words of Livy,^ " the fountain of all public and private law." Boys learnt it by heart down to the days of Cicero, and he, despite his admiration for things Greek, declares it to surpass the libraries of all the philosophers.^ For some generations there seem to have been compara- tively few large changes in private law, except that declara- tion of the right of full civil intermarriage between patricians and plebeians, which the Twelve Tables had denied. But the knowledge of the days on which legal proceedings could properly be taken remained confined to the patricians for nearly a century and a half after the Decemvirs. The plebs had, however, been winning political equality, and three or four years after the time when the clerk Flavins revealed these pontifical secrets it was completed by the admission of the plebeians to the offices of pontlflF and augur. Meanwhile Rome was conquering Italy. The defeat of Pyrrhus in b. c. 275 marks the virtual completion of this process. A little later, the First Punic War gave her most of Sicily as well as Sardinia and Corsica, and these territories became provinces, administered by magistrates sent from Rome, She was thus launched on a policy of unlimited territorial expansion, and one of its first results was seen in two remarkable legal changes. The increase in the power and commerce of Rome, due to her conquests, had brought a large number of persons to the city, as residents or as sojourners, who were not citizens, and who therefore could not sue or be sued according to the forms of the law proper to Romans. It became necessary to provide for the litiga- tion to which the disputes of these aliens (peregrini) with one super alias acervatarum legum cumulo fons omnis publici privatique est juris" (iii. 24). ' " Bibliothecas mehercule omnium philosophorum unus mihi videtur xii tabularum libellus, slquis legum fontes et capita viderit, et auctori- tatis pondere et utilitatis ubertate superare" (De Oral. i. 44). An odd comparison, and one in which there is more of patriotism than of philos- ophy.
 * " Decern tabularum leges quae nunc quoque in hoc immenso aliarum