all have to explain later on.[559] In other
words, it is the maintenance of the _pax deorum_ that they are chiefly
concerned with; the crime of the citizen is a violation of that _pax_,
and the deity most concerned will punish the community unless some
expiatory step is taken to re-establish the right relation between the
human and divine inhabitants of the city. "Pellex aram Iunonis ne
tangito; si tanget, Iunoni crinibus demissis agnum feminam caedito." "Si
parentem puer verberit, ast olle plorassit, puer divis parentum sacer
esto."[560] The harlot who touches the altar of Juno, the deity of
married women, breaks the _pax_ with that deity, and she must offer a
piacular sacrifice to renew it; the son who strikes a parent is made
over as the property of the _divi parentum_, _i.e._ those of the whole
community,[561] the peaceful relation with whom his act has imperilled.
With such rules as these the civil magistrate of the republic can have
had nothing to do; they belong to an older period of thought and of
government, and survived in the books of the college which under the
republic continued to administer the _ius divinum_; for these rules
doubtless continued to exist side by side with the civil law as it
gradually developed itself, and the necessary modes of expiation were
known to the pontifices only. Roman society was indeed so deeply
penetrated for many ages with the idea of _religio_--the dread of
violating the _pax deorum_,--that the idea of law as a matter of the
relation of man to man, as "the interference of the State in the
passions and interests of humanity only," must have gained ground by
very slow degrees. This primitive religious law then, _i.e._ the
regulation of the proper steps to be taken to avoid a breach of the _pax
deorum_, was entirely in the hands of the religious authorities, the Rex
at first and then the pontifices, as the only experts who could know the
secrets of the _ius divinum_; and from their decisions and prescriptions
there could be no appeal, simply because there was no individual or body
in the State to whom an appeal was conceivable. But after the rule of
the Etruscan kings, with all its disturbing influences, and after the
revolution which got rid of them, there must have been an age of new
ideas and increased mental activity, and also of increasing social
complexity, the signs of which in the way of trade and industry we have
already found in certain facts of religious history. In th