Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/141

V gods, — all that the Romans understood by the words jus sacrum, — was theirs and theirs only. For a person to meddle with such things, who was not qualified by birth or education or tradition, nor expressly invited by the State as a reformer, was not only to interfere with the rights of a class, but positively to disturb the good relations of the city with its gods, and thus to imperil its very life. Of these relations, and of this life, the noble families were in a way trustees; what wonder, then, if their trusteeship increased their pride and narrowed their sympathies, raising in them a growing contempt for men who knew nothing of the will or the needs of the divine inhabitants of the city?

So it was also in the region of profane law, as it slowly disentangled itself from the law of religious usage. Here, too, the rule held good that all solemn acts must be performed according to prescribed order, if they were to have any binding force. Rules governing the tenure of land, rules governing the transference of all property by succession or sale, rules governing the treatment of evil-doers and the adjustment of all disputes, so far as they came under the cognisance of the State at all, were known and administered by the aristocracy only. They were as much matter of technical and traditional knowledge as the religious law, and could not be administered save by those to whom a divine order had entrusted that knowledge. The executive of the State, in fact, was in the hands of