Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/264

240 expressed the jus civile, that is, the law which bound cives Romani and no others. Now in the oligarchical period just surveyed, in which Rome came into contact with and conquered a great number of other peoples, Italians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Spaniards, her commercial transactions increased to an extraordinary extent, and the city became the chief centre of business for the whole Mediterranean. In the earlier part of this period a serious legal difficulty arose out of this great commercial development. Each foreigner who came on business to Rome was accustomed to the law of his own State, but at Rome that law had, of course, no force, nor could the Roman jus civile be of any avail for him, unless the use of it were specially secured him by treaty, which was very rarely the case. If he wanted to borrow on equitable terms, or to recover a debt, or to prove his right to a property he had bought, he had no legal force to fall back on; all his transactions were carried on at a risk, and had no more legal security than the barter of savages.

About the end of the first war with Carthage, it became plain that if Rome was to rival or to outdo the great trading city of the west, her government must find some method of giving a legal sanction to the transactions of foreigners with Romans, or among themselves on her own soil. It does not seem to have occurred to them to apply the jus civile in this way, for the spirit of the City-State