a man's
alleged offences ranged themselves, he might be indicted at once or
successively before several different Commissions, on the chance of
some one of them declaring itself competent to convict him; and,
although conviction by one Quaestio ousted the jurisdiction of the
rest, acquittal by one of them could not be pleaded to an accusation
before another. This was directly contrary to the rule of the Roman
civil law; and we may be sure that a people so sensitive as the Romans
to anomalies (or, as their significant phrase was, to _inelegancies_)
in jurisprudence, would not long have tolerated it, had not the
melancholy history of the Quaestiones caused them to be regarded much
more as temporary weapons in the hands of factions than as permanent
institutions for the correction of crime. The Emperors soon abolished
this multiplicity and conflict of jurisdiction; but it is remarkable
that they did not remove another singularity of the criminal law which
stands in close connection with the number of the Courts. The
classifications of crimes which are contained even in the Corpus
Juris of Justinian are remarkably capricious. Each Quaestio had, in
fact, confined itself to the crimes committed to its cognisance by its
charter. These crimes, however, were only classed together in the
original statute because they happened to call simultaneously for
castigation at the moment of passing it. They had not therefore
anything necessarily in common; but the fact of their constituting the
particular subject-matter of trials before a particular Quaestio
impressed itself naturally on the public attention, and so inveterate
did the association become between the offences mentioned in the same
statute that, even when formal attempts were made by Sylla and by the
Emperor Augustus to consolidate the Roman criminal law, the legislator
preserved the old grouping. The Statutes of Sylla and Augustus were
the foundation of the penal jurisprudence of the Empire, and nothing
can be more extraordinary than some of the classifications which they
bequeathed to it. I need only give a single example in the fact that
_perjury_ was always classed with _cutting and wounding_ and with
_poisoning_, no doubt because a law of Sylla, the Lex Cornelia de
Sicariis et Veneficis, had given jurisdiction over all these three
forms of crime to the same Permanent Commission. It seems too that
this capricious grouping of crimes affected the vernacular speech of
the Ro