ry begins, the pontifices and their head had reached a very high
level of power, as we shall presently see more in detail; the process of
the growth of this power must therefore lie in the two preceding
centuries, during which Rome was slowly attaining that paramount
position in Italy in which we find her at the time of the Punic wars.
Thirdly, we know that in that third century B.C. the college was laid
open to plebeians as well as to members of the old patrician gentes, and
that one of the most famous of all its many distinguished heads was not
only not a patrician, but a Latin from Cameria, Ti. Coruncanius. Putting
these three facts together we can divine in outline the history of the
pontifices during these two centuries. With the instinct for order and
organisation that never failed them, the Romans have constructed a
_permanent_ power to take charge of their _ius divinum_, _i.e._ all
their relations to the deities with whom they must maintain a _pax_; the
circumstances of their career during two centuries have exalted this
power to an extraordinary degree of influence, direct and indirect,
internal and external; and, lastly, in a period which saw the gradual
amalgamation into a unified whole of privileged and unprivileged,
_patres_ and _plebs_, they have with wonderful wisdom thrown open to all
citizens the administration of that _ius_ which was essential to the
welfare of the united community. These are indisputable facts; and they
are thoroughly characteristic of the practical wisdom of the Roman
people in that early age.

In order to understand how the pontifices attained their great position,
the one thing needful is to examine the nature of their work. This I
propose to do next, and then to attempt to sum up the result of their
activity on the Roman religious system.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the college in the
early history of Roman law; and for us in particular that importance
lies in the fact that they were the sole depositaries of the religious
law in the period during which the civil law was being slowly
disentangled from it. If we look at the so-called _leges regiae_, which
are probably the oldest rules of law that have come down to us (though
they may have been made into a collection as late as the very end of the
Republic),[558] we see at once that they belong to the _ius divinum_;
and there is little doubt that they were extracted from those books of
the pontifices which I sh