in two ways which were open to the pontifices, and indeed
at this early time to no one else. First, it was necessary to make their
provisions effectual by prescribing in each case the proper method of
procedure (_actio_). Now it is most important to grasp the fact that
procedure in the _ius civile_ was originally of precisely the same
nature as procedure in the _ius divinum_, and that precisely the same
rigid exactness is indispensable in both. Action and formula in civil
law belong to the same class of practices as sacrifice and prayer in
religious law, and spring from the same mental soil. Thus, for example,
the most familiar case of action and formula in civil law, the
_sacramentum_, was, as the name proves, a piece of religious procedure,
_i.e._ the deposition in a sacred spot of a sum of money which the
suitor in the case would forfeit if he lost it, together with the
utterance of a certain formula of words which must be correctly spoken.
If we choose to go back so far, we may even see in this combination of
formularised act and speech a survival of magical or quasi-magical
belief;[568] but this is matter rather for the anthropologist than the
historian of religion. The point for us at this moment is that these
acts and formulae (_legis actiones_, as they are known in Roman law)
could not suddenly or rapidly pass out of the hands of that body of
skilled experts which had so long been in sole possession of them; the
publication of old and new rules of law in the XII. Tables made no
immediate difference in this respect. The consuls, the new civil
executive, were still in no sense necessarily skilled in such matters,
and were without the prestige of the former executive, the Rex; they
were also doubtless busy with other work, especially in the field.
Nothing could be more natural than that the pontifices should continue
to provide the procedure for the now written law, just as they had
formerly supplied it for the unwritten.[569]

So, too, with the _interpretation_ of the Tables; this was the second
part of the work that still remained to them. Writing was in that age a
mystery to the mass of the population, and doubtless the idea was still
in their minds that there was something supernatural about it. Writing,
in fact, as well as formularised action and speech, may have had the
flavour of magic about it. However that may be, there can be no doubt
that the interpretation of a legal document was in those days a much
mo