18. BRYCE: THE EXTENSION OF LAW 587 A point, for instance, about which we should like to be better informed is whether the Roman rules which gave to the father his wide power over his children and their children were forthwith extended to provincial families. The Romans themselves looked upon this paternal power as an institution peculiar to themselves. To us moderns, and especially to Englishmen and Americans, it seems so oppressive that we cannot but suppose it was different in practice from what it looks on paper. And although it had lost some of its old severity by the time of the Antonines, one would think that communities which had not grown up under it could hardly receive it with pleasure. ^ From the time of Caracalla (a. d. 211-217) down till the I death of Theodosius the Great (a. d. 395) the Empire had I but one law. There was doubtless a certain amount of / special legislation for particular provinces, and a good deal | of customary law peculiar to certain provinces or parts of | them. Although before the time of Justinian it would seem that every Roman subject, except the half-barbarous peoples on the frontiers, such as the Soanes and Abkhasians of the Caucasus or the Ethiopic tribes of Nubia, and except a very small class of freedmen, was in the enjoyment of Roman citizenship, with private rights substantially the same, yet it is clear that in the East some Roman principles and maxims were never fully comprehended by the mass of the inhabitants and their legal advisers of the humbler sort, while other principles did not succeed in displacing alto- gether the rules to which the people were attached. We have evidence in recently recovered fragments of an appar- ently widely used law-book, Syriac and Armenian copies of which remain, that this was the case in the Eastern prov- inces, and no doubt it was so in others also. In Egypt, for instance, it may be gathered from the fragments of papyri which are now being published, that the old native customs, overlaid, or re-moulded to some extent by Greek law, held their ground even down to the sixth or seventh century.*
- This is carefully worked out both as to Syria and to Egypt by Dr.
Mitteis, op. cit. He thinks (pn. .SO-SS") that the law of the Syrian book, where it departs from pure Roman law as we find it in the Corpus luris, is mainly of Greek origin, though with traces of Eastern custom.
