suitor.

But here a difficulty arose: what law was to be applied to a transaction
between a Roman and a foreigner, or between two foreigners? The Roman
law, the law of citizens, had been codified two centuries earlier, and
its outline had been hardened by the practice of two centuries. The
forms for a transfer of property, for instance, were rigid and solemn;
the foreigner would hardly know them, and if he did, his alien hand
could not effectively do the prescribed acts nor his alien mouth speak
the almost sacred words. The answer was that behind the forms of the law
of this city or that, there was 'a law of the men of all nations'. The
common elements in the ordinary transactions of life, in whatever form
they were clothed, could be taken into account and given effect to.
Thus, side by side with the ownership according to the law of Roman
citizens, the solemn words of promise which only a Roman citizen could
utter, the marriage which only a Roman citizen could enter into, there
might be property, contract, marriage to which any one, citizen or
alien, might be a party.

This 'law of the men of all nations' (_ius gentium_) was of course not
an international law, it was a law administered by Roman officers, and
it was coloured by Roman conceptions, however much it may have drawn
from a comparison of foreign laws with which the Romans were brought
into contact. In turn it reacted upon the more narrow law of Roman
citizens (_ius civile_), broadening its conceptions and enabling it to
free itself from primitive formalism. It also made easier the task of
Roman governors who were called upon to administer the various laws of
the different countries which came to form the Roman empire.

The gradual extension of the citizenship (completed at the end of the
second century A.D.) to the whole of the inhabitants of the empire made
possible, at least in outward appearance, the application of a uniform
system of law throughout what was then the civilized world, though
beneath an apparent uniformity local traditions and customs survived to
the end, at any rate in the east. The 'civil law', as the Roman law in
its final form has been called down to the present day, consists of
elements of the narrowly Roman and the more universal law inextricably
interlaced.

This Roman solution of the problem of the foreign litigant is of much
more than merely practical importance. The Stoic philosophy which grew
up amid the decay of the old city l