Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/204

184 was a code of moral formulæ gradually developed by the priests, and the pontifices in particular, over and above their regulation of legal procedure. This moral law on the one hand supplied the place of police regulations at a period when the state was still far from providing any direct police-guardianship for its citizens; and on the other hand it brought to the bar of the gods and visited with divine penalties the breach of those moral obligations which could not be reached at all, or could be but imperfectly enforced, by the law of the state. The regulations of the former class religiously inculcated the due observance of holidays, and the cultivation of the fields and vineyards according to the rules of good husbandry, which we shall have occasion to notice more fully in the sequel. To this class belonged also the worship of the hearth or of the Lares, which was connected with considerations of sanitary police (P. 173), and above all the practice of burning the bodies of the dead, adopted among the Romans at a singularly early period, far earlier than among the Greeks—a practice implying a rational conception of life and of death, such as was foreign to primitive times and is even foreign to ourselves at the present day. It must be reckoned no small achievement that the national religion of the Latins was able to carry out these and similar improvements. But the moral effect of this law was still more important. Under this head we might take notice of the fact itself, that every sentence, at least every capital sentence, was primarily conceived as the curse of the divinity offended by the crime. But not only did that curse accompany the judgment pronounced by the community; it also supplemented its deficiencies. If a husband sold his wife, or a father sold his married son; if a child struck the father, or a daughter-in-law her father-in-law; if a patron violated his obligation to keep faith with his guest or dependent, the civil law had no penalty for such outrages, but the burden of the curse of the gods lay thenceforth on the head of the offender. Not that the person thus accursed (sacer) was outlawed; such an outlawry, inconsistent in its very nature with all civil order, was only an exceptional occurrence in Rome—an aggravation of the religious curse at the time of the quarrels between the orders. It was not the province of the civil authorities, still less of the individual burgess or of the wholly powerless priest, to carry into effect the divine curse; the life of the person accursed was forfeited not to man but to the gods. But the pious popular