Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/256

 250 THE CITY. BOOK III. affected religion, it could not take place without the consent of the pontiff. To make a will was to break the order that religion iiad established for the trans- mission of property and of the worship. The will, therefore, in the beginning, required to be authorized by the pontiff. As the limits of every man's land were established by religion, Avhcncver two neighbors had a dispute about boundaries, they had to plead before the priests called fratres arvales. This explains why the same men were pontiffs and jurists — law and religion were but one.' At Athens the archon and the king had very nearly the same judicial functions as the Roman pontiff.'* The origin of ancient laws appears clearly. No man invented them. Solon, Lycurgus, Minos, Numa, might have reduced the laws of their cities to writing, but they could not have made them. If we understand by legis- lator a man who creates a code by the power of his genius, and who imposes it upon other men, this legisla- tor never existed among the ancients. Nor did ancient law originate with the votes of the people. The idea that a certain number of votes might make a law did not appear in the cities till very late, and only after two revolutions had transformed them. Up to that time laws had appeared to men as something ancient, im- mutable, and venerable. As old as the city itself, the founder had established them at the same time that he served even to Justinian's time — Jurisprudentia est rerum dirinarum atqiie humanarvm notiiia. Cf. Cicero, De Legib. II. 9; II. I'J; DeArusp.Resp.,7. Dionjsius, II. 73. Tacitus Ann., I. 10; Hist., I. 15. Dion Cassius, XLVIII. 44. Pliny, N. II., XVIII. 2. Aulus Gellius, V. 19; XV. 27. • Pollux, VIII. 90.
 * Hence this old definition, which the jurisconsults pre-