Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/265

VIII was still strong in them in spite of its wonderful expansion, and the law of the Tables was a sacred heirloom of the cives Romani, whose paramount importance in the world was increasing every year. The dignity of the Roman could not brook the use of his most precious possession for the benefit of foreigners.

This exclusive spirit forced the Romans to a step by which a permanent solution of the difficulty was found; at the same time it opened a new period of development for their system of law, and widened their appreciation of all legal principles, which had hitherto been as narrow as they were clear and strong. They fell back now on that distinct conception of magisterial power to which I have already several times alluded. They had already, at the time of the reforms of Licinius and Sextius, handed over the civil jurisdiction of the consul to a prætor, a new magistrate with an imperium, like that of the consul, sufficient to enforce his commands and rulings, though he was inferior to the consul in precedence and dignity. In 243 B.C. they added another prætor, whose business it was to be to decide all suits between Romans and foreigners, or between foreigners themselves; and henceforward the prætor urbanus administered the jus civile, while the prætor peregrinus was to do the best he could with another kind of jus, in which the solution of the growing difficulty was to be found.

What was the jus which the prætor peregrinus was to administer? It existed in no code, like the Twelve Tables; it was not law in any true sense of the