586 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY population, in Corsica, for instance, or in some of the Alpine valleys. Our information as to the era to which this famous Edict of Caracalla's belongs is lamentably scanty. Gains, who is the best authority for the middle period of the law, lived fifty or sixty years earlier. The compilers of Jus- tinian's Digest, which is the chief source of our knowledge for the law as a whole, lived three hundred years later, when the old distinctions between the legal rights of citizens and those of aliens had become mere matters of antiquarian curi- osity. These compilers therefore modified the passages of the older jurists which they inserted in the Digest so as to make them suit their own more recent time. As practical men they were right, but they have lessened the historical value of these fragments of the older jurists, just as the modern restorer of a church spoils it for the purposes of architectural history, when he alters it to suit his own ideas of beauty or convenience. Still it may fairly be assumed that when Caracalla's grant of citizenship was made the bulk of the people, or at least of the town dwellers, had al- ready obtained either a complete or an incomplete citizenship in the more advanced provinces, and that those who had not were at any rate enjoying under the provincial Edicts most of the civil rights that had previously been confined to citi- zens, such for instance as the use of the so-called Praetorian Will with its seven seals. How far the pre-existing local law of different provinces or districts was superseded at one stroke by this extension of citizenship, or in other words, what direct and immediate change was effected in the modes of jurisdiction and in the personal relations of private persons, Is a question which we have not the means of answering. Apparently many dif- ficulties arose which further legislation, not always con- sistent, was required to deal wlth.^ One would naturally suppose that where Roman rules differed materially from those which a provincial community had fHln^vod, the latter could not have been suddenly substituted for the former.
- See upon this subiect the learned and acute treatise (hv which I
have been much aided) of Dr. I/. Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht in den ostlichen Provinzen des Bomischen Kaiserreichs, Chap. VI.
