Classical type. The rustic instincts were more and more pushed back by the intelligence of the city.[1] Consequently from about 350 we find side by side with the lex rogata of the people the lex data, the administrative law, of the prætor. With this the Twelve Tables idea drops out of the contest and it is the prætor's edict that becomes the football of the party battle.
It did not take long for the prsetor to become the centre of both legislation and judicial practice. And presently, corresponding to the political extension of the city's power, the jurisdiction of the prætor and the field of his jus civile — the law of the citizens — begin to diminish in significance and the peregrin prætor with his jus gentium — the law of the alien — steps into the foreground. And when finally the whole population of the Classical world, save the small part possessing Roman citizenship, was comprised in the field of this alien law, the jus peregrinum of the city of Rome became practically an imperial law. All other cities — and even Alpine tribes and migrant Bedouin clans were civitates from the administrative point of view — retained their local laws only as supplements, not alternatives, to the peregrin law of Rome.
It marked the close of Classical law-making, therefore, when Hadrian (about A.D. 130) introduced the Edictum perpetuum, which gave final form to the well-established corpus of the annual pronouncements of the prætors and forbade further modifications thereof. It was still, as before, the prætor's duty to publish the "law of his year," but, even though this law had no greater degree of validity than corresponded to his administrative powers and was not the law of the Empire, he was obliged thenceforth to stick to the established text.[2] It is the very symbol of the petrified "Late" Civilization.[3]
With the Hellenistic age began jurisprudence, the science of law, the systematic comprehension of the law which men actually apply. Since legal thought presupposes a substance of political and economic relations, in the same way as mathematical thought presupposes physical and technical elements of knowledge,[4] Rome very soon became the home of Classical jurisprudence. Similarly in the Mexican world it was the conquering Aztecs whose academies (e.g., Tezcuco) made law the chief subject of study. Classical jurisprudence was the Roman's science, and his only one. At the very moment when the creative mathematic closes off with Archimedes, juristic literature begins with Ælius's Tripertita, a commentary on the Twelve (198 B.C).[5] The first systematic private law was written by M. Scævola about 100. The genuine maturity of Classical law is in the two centuries 200-0 — although we to-day, with quaint perversity, apply
- ↑ Cf. Ch. IV below.
- ↑ Sohm, Institutionen (14) p. 101. [This is the edict of "Julian" (Salvius Julianus, urban prætor). Romanists are not agreed as to how far, if at all, it included material derived from the decisions of the peregrin prætor. See Professor Goudy's article "Roman Law," Ency. Brit., XI ed., p. 563. — Tr.]
- ↑ Lenel, Das Edictum perpetuum (1907); L. Wenger, p. 168.
- ↑ Even the multiplication table of the children assumes the elements of dynamics in counting.
- ↑ V. Mayr II, 1, p. 85; Sohm, p. 105.
