Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/368

 children, that is, those who had been relieved by their father from the semi-servile condition in which they stood towards him, thereafter became as strangers to their own family in the eye of the law. The narrow conceptions of the primitive laws as defined in the Twelve Tables (462 ) were productive of much flagrant injustice of this kind, as it appeared to the Romans themselves as time wore on. After the lapse of about a century, a new magistrate, second in authority only to the Consuls, was created under the title of Praetor, and his functions gradually evolved themselves into those of the chief justice of the Republic. Although legislative powers were not bestowed on him, he became virtually a legislator, and in his court equity was administered in accordance with the current development of public opinion. Thus he became a special providence for all those who found themselves hard pressed by the cramped enactments of the old laws, which were sometimes supplemented, sometimes evaded by a legal fiction or subterfuge in the Praetor's Court. On taking office, each Praetor published an edict in which he stated the views he took of debatable questions in law; and his rules and decisions, though caduciary, were often confirmed and fixed by Imperial legislation. By the reign of Hadrian a considerable body of law had been thus concreted, which that emperor ordered to be codified by Salvius Julianus, and thus a collection of statutes, called the Per-*