Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/266

242 word. It consisted of the practices and customs of the various peoples, chiefly Italian and Greek, who came in that age to Rome on business, and needed a legal basis for their transactions; taken together, no doubt, with those principles of the jus civile in which the prætor himself had been trained, and from which he could not escape, especially in dealings between foreigners and Romans. This jus came to be called the jus gentium, or law of all peoples, when lawyers began to reason upon it and to endeavour to explain it scientifically; at first, however, it was no more than a series of rulings of which the force depended simply on the imperium of the prætor, entrusted to him for this purpose by the Roman people. Thus their clear idea of magisterial power came to the rescue of the Romans when their legal sense was puzzled by the new conditions under which they found themselves; and it combined with their strong practical common sense to build up a system of equity outside the narrow law of their own State.

From the close of the first Punic war and onwards, the rulings of the prætor peregrinus continued to accumulate, and to form a body of legal principles applicable to almost all difficulties that might arise. They were recorded year by year in the edict which each prætor issued at the beginning of his year of office, by virtue of the jus edicendi which all the higher Roman magistrates possessed. Here the conservative spirit of the Romans, and their instinct for order and precedent in public transactions, saved them from a contingency which