Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/353

XI its ruins; and it is not too much to say that if we had the whole number of inscriptions set up in any Roman town, during a single century, we should have an almost perfect picture of its life and government.

Thirdly, in order fully to understand the nature of the new State and the progress towards a substantial unity of all its parts, it is necessary to have some acquaintance with the history of Roman law under the Empire, and of what is closely connected with it, the history of the incorporation of all free inhabitants into the Roman citizenship. We have seen how upon the law of the City-State (jus civile) was engrafted a new body of legal rules (jus gentium), through the agency of the prætor peregrinus, destined in time to cover all the difficulties that might arise between man and man, whether Roman or non-Roman. Strictly speaking, this new law had been administered in Rome only; in the provinces either the local communities administered their own law, or the provincial governor decided cases after his own method, — that method being often arbitrary, and not necessarily brought into harmony with the principles on which the prætor was acting at home. Only in communities of Roman or Latin citizens was the Roman law alone supreme. But even before the Republic came to an end it is probable that many non-Roman towns voluntarily adopted the Roman law. And at the same time we find the process of extending the citizenship to such towns already beginning; so that, just as Roman law had become the general law of Italy