world, even under the rule of tyrants and madmen, and this has survived
all the calamities of fifteen hundred years. The Roman laws--founded by
the Republic, but symmetrically completed by the Empire--have more
powerfully affected the interests of civilization than have the
philosophy and arts of Greece. Roman jurisprudence was not perfectly
developed until five hundred years after the Christian era, when
Justinian consolidated it into the Code, the Pandects, and the
Institutes. The classical jurists, like Gaius, Ulpian, and Paulus, may
have laid the foundation, but the superstructure was raised under the
auspices of the imperial despots.

The earliest code of Roman laws was called the Twelve Tables, framed
from the report of the commissioners sent to Athens and other Greek
States, to collect what was most useful in their legal systems. The laws
of the Twelve Tables were the basis of all the Roman laws, civil and
religious. But the edicts of the praetors, who were the great equity
judges as well as the common-law magistrates, proclaimed certain changes
which custom and the practice of the courts had introduced; and these,
added to the _leges populi_, or laws proposed by the consul and passed
by the centuries, the _plebiscita_, or laws proposed by the tribunes
and passed by the tribes, and the _senatus consulta,_ or decrees of the
senate, gradually swelled the laws to a great number. Three thousand
engraved plates of brass containing these various laws were deposited in
the capitol.

Subtleties and fictions were in the course of litigations introduced by
the lawyers to defeat the written statutes, and jurisprudence became
complicated as early as the time of Cicero. Even the opinions of eminent
lawyers were adopted by the legal profession as authoritative, and were
recognized by the courts. The evils of a complicated jurisprudence were