Chapter I: Five Chief Epochs of Legal Change at Rome

In the thousand years of Roman history that lie between the first authentic records of the constitution and laws of the city, say 451 B.C., when the Decemviral Commission, which produced the laws of the Twelve Tables, was appointed, and 565 A.D., when Justinian died, having completed his work of codification and new legislation[143], we may single out five such epochs.

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Footnote 143:

It is convenient to stop with Justinian, because he gave the law the
shape in which it has influenced modern Europe, and because our
historical data became much more scanty after his time. But of course
the history of the law goes on to A.D. 1204, and in a sense even to
A.D. 1453, in an unbroken stream, the codes issued by the later
Emperors, and especially the _Basilica_ of Leo the Philosopher, being
based upon Justinian’s redaction.

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1. The epoch of the Decemviral Legislation, when many of the old customs of the nation, which had been for the most part preserved by oral tradition, were written down, being no doubt modified in the process.

2. The days of the First and Second Punic Wars, when the growth of population and trade, the increase of the number of foreigners resident in Rome, and the conquest by Rome of territories outside Italy, began to induce the development of the Praetorship as an office for expanding and slowly remodelling the law.

3. The end of the Republic and early days of the Empire, when there was a brilliant development of juridical literature, when the opinions of selected jurists received legal authority from the Emperor’s commission, when the Senate was substituted for the popular assemblies as the organ of legislation, and when the administration of the provinces was resettled on a better basis—all these changes inducing a more rapid progress of legal reform.

4. The reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, when imperial legislation took a fresh and vigorous start, and when the triumph of Christianity brought a new, a powerful, and a widely pervasive force into the field of politics and legislation.

5. The reign of Justinian, when the plan of codification whose outlines Julius Caesar had conceived, and which Theodosius II had done something to carry out, was at last completed by the inclusion of the whole law of Rome in two books containing the pith of the then existing law, and when many sweeping reforms were effected by new legislation.

It is less easy to fix upon epochs of conspicuous change in English legal institutions and law, because English development has been on the whole more gradual, and because the territorial limits of the area affected by change have not expanded to anything like the same extent as did the territories that obeyed Rome. Rome was a City which grew to be the civilized world: the _Urbs_ became _Orbis Terrarum_. The English were, and remain, a people inhabiting the southern part of an island, and beyond its limits they have expanded (except as respects Ireland), not by taking in new territories as parts of their State, but by planting semi-dependent self-governing States which reproduce England[144]. However, one may, for the sake of a comparison with Rome, take the five following epochs as those at which the process of change became the most swift and the most effective for destruction and creation.

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Footnote 144:

I do not include India or the Crown Colonies, because the population
of these is not English.

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