384 HISTORY OF GREECE. their secret suffrage, and the impossibility of knowing beforehand what individuals would sit m any particular cause, prevented both the one and the other. And besides that the magnitude of their number, extravagant, according to our ideas of judicial business, was essential to this tutelary effect,^ it served farther to render the trial solemn and the verdict imposing on the minds of parties and spectators, as we may see by the fact that, in important causes, the dikastery was doubled or tripled. Nor was it possi- ble, by any other means than numbers,^ to give dignity to an as- authority. Indeed, lie seems to regard this as au incorrigible chronic mal- ady in society, necessitating ever-recurring disputes between powerful men and the body of the people. " The people (he says) desire to live according to the laws ; the great men desire to overrule the laws : it is therefore impossi- ble that the two should march in harmony." " Volendo il popolo vivere se- condo le leggi, e i potenti comandare a quelle, non e possibile che capino insierae." (Macciavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, Hv. ii, p. 79, ad ann. 1282.) The first book of the interesting tale, called the Promessi Sposi, of Man- zoni, — itself full of historical matter, and since published with illustrative notes by the historian Cantu, — exhibits a state of judicial administration, vei-y similar to that above described, in the Milanese, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries : demonstrated by repeated edicts, all ineflFectual, to bring powerful men under the real control of the laws. Because men of wealth and power, in the principal governments of modem Europe, are now completely under the control of the laws, the modern reader is apt to suppose that this is the natural state of things. It is tlicrefore not unimportant to produce some references, which might be indefinitely multiplied, reminding him of the veiy different phenomena which past history exhibits almost everywhere. ' The number of Roman judices employed to try a criminal cause under the quccstiones perpetuce in the last century and a half of the Repubhc, seems to have varied between one hundred, seventy-five, seventy, fifty-six, fifty- one, tliirty-two, etc. (Laboulaye, Essai sur les Loix Criminelles des Ro- mains, p. 336, Paris, 1845.) In the time of Augustus, there was a total of four thousand judices at Rome, distributed into four decuries (Pliny, H. N. xxxiii, 1, 31). The venality, as well as the party corruption of these Roman judices, or jurors, taken from the senatorial and equestrian orders, the two highest and richest orders in the state, — was well-known and flagrant (Appian, Bell. Civ. i, 22, 35, 37; Laboulaye, ibid. pp. 217-227; "Walter, Greschichte des Romischen Rechts, ch. xxviii, sect. 237, 238 ; Asconius in Ciceron. Verrin. pp. 141-145, cd. Orell. ; and Cicero himself, in the remarkable letter to Al- liens, Ep. ad Attic, i, 16). ^ Numerous dikasteries taken bv lot seem to have been established in
