Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/178

158 sense of the term, but simply a consequence of the father's inherent right of property in his children. We find no traces of any jurisdiction appertaining to the gentes as such, or of any judicature at all that did not derive its authority from the king. As regards the right of self-redress and in particular the avenging of blood, we still find in legends an echo perhaps of the original principle that a murderer, or any one who should illegally protect a murderer, might justifiably be slain by the kinsmen of the person murdered; but these very legends characterize such a principle as objectionable, and from their statements blood-revenge would appear to have been early suppressed in Rome by the energetic assertion of the authority of the state. In like manner we perceive in the earliest Roman law no trace of that influence which under the oldest Germanic institutions the comrades of the accused and the people present were entitled to exercise over the pronouncing of judgment; nor do we find in the former any evidence of the usage so frequent in the latter, by which the mere will and power to maintain a claim with arms in hand were treated as judicially necessary, or at any rate admissible.

Judicial procedure took the form of a public or a private process, according as the king interposed of his own motion, or only when appealed to by the injured party. The former course was taken only in cases which involved a breach of the public peace. First of all, therefore, it was applicable in the case of public treason or communion with the public enemy (proditio), and in that of violent rebellion against the magistracy (perduellio). But the public peace was also broken by the foul murderer (paricida), the sodomite, the violator of a maiden's or matron's chastity, the incendiary, the false witness, by those, moreover, who with evil spells con-