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446
THE DECLINE AND FALL
proofs of a common descent from Egypt or Phœnicia.[1] But in all the great lines of public and private jurisprudence, the legislators of Rome and Athens appear to be strangers or adverse to each other.
Their character and influence Whatever might be the origin or the merit of the twelve tables,[2] they obtained among the Romans that blind and partial reverence which the lawyers of every country delight to bestow on their municipal institutions. The study is recommended by Cicero[3] as equally pleasant and instructive. "They amuse the mind by the remembrance of old words and the portrait of ancient manners: they inculcate the soundest principles of government and morals; and I am not afraid to affirm that the brief composition of the Decemvirs surpasses in genuine value the libraries of Grecian philosophy. How admirable," says Tully, with honest or affected prejudice, "is the wisdom of our ancestors! We alone are the masters of civil prudence, and our superiority is the more conspicuous, if we deign to cast our eyes on the rude and almost ridiculous jurisprudence of Dracon, of Solon, and of Lycurgus." The Twelve Tables were committed to the memory of the young and the meditation of the old; they were transcribed and illustrated with learned diligence; they had escaped the flames of the Gauls, they subsisted in the age of Justinian, and their subsequent loss has been imperfectly restored by the labours of modern critics.[4] But, although these venerable monuments were considered as the rule of right and the fountain of justice,[5] they were overwhelmed by the weight and variety of new laws, which, at the end of five centuries, became a grievance more intolerable than the vices- ↑ The tenth table, de modo sepulturæ, was borrowed from Solon (Cicero de Legibus, ii. 23-26): the furtum per lancem et licium conceptum is derived by Heineccius from the manners of Athens (Antiquitat. Rom. tom. ii. p. 167-175). The right of killing a nocturnal thief was declared by Moses, Solon, and the Decemvirs (Exodus, xxii. 3. Demosthenes contra Timocratem, tom. i. p. 736, edit. Reiske. Macrob. Saturnalia, l. i. c. 4. Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum, tit. vii. No. 1, p. 218, edit. Cannegieter).
- ↑ Βραχέως καὶ ἁπερίττως is the praise of Diodorus (tom. i. l. xii. p. 494 [c. 26]), which may be fairly translated by the eleganti atque absolutâ brevitate verborum of Aulus Gellius (Noct. Attic, xxi. 1).
- ↑ Listen to Cicero (de Legibus, ii. 23) and his representative Crassus (de Oratore, i. 43, 44).
- ↑ See Heineccius (Hist. J. R. No. 29-33). I have followed the restoration of the xii tables by Gravina (Origines J. C. p. 280-307) and Terrasson (Hist. de la Jurisprudence Romaine, p. 94-205). [There is a convenient text of the fragments of the xii. tables in Gneist's Institutionum et Regularum juris Romani Syntagma.]
- ↑ Finis æqui juris (Tacit. Annal. iii. 27). Fons omnis publici et privati juris (T. Liv. iii. 34).
