re serious, if a less arduous business, than it is now. Here again,
then, it seems perfectly natural that there should be no rapid or
violent change in the _personnel_ of those deemed capable of such
interpretation; there was no other body of experts capable of the work;
the pontifices remained _iuris-consulti_, _i.e._ interpreters and
advisers, and in the course of two and a half centuries accumulated an
amount of material that formed a basis for the first published system of
Roman law, the _ius Aelianum_ or _tripartita_ of 200 B.C. It is most
useful to remember, as proof of this, that one member of the college was
selected every year for the special purpose of helping the people with
advice in matters of civil law, both in regard to interpretation and the
choice of _legis actiones_; so we are expressly told by Pomponius, who
adds that this practice continued for about a hundred years after the
publication of the Tables, _i.e._ till the election of the first praetor
in 366.[570] After that date the _ius civile_ emerges more distinctly
from the old body of law, which included also the _ius divinum_, and its
interpretation was no longer a matter purely for religious experts. In
337 we hear of the first _plebeian_ praetor--truly a momentous event,
showing that the old profound belief is dying out, which demanded a
religious and patrician qualification for all legal work. And at the end
of the fourth century comes the publication, not only of the _legis
actiones_, but of the Fasti, _i.e._ even of that most vital part of the
_ius divinum_, which distinguished the times and seasons belonging to
the numina from those belonging to the human citizens.[571] One might
well suppose that the power of the pontifices was on the wane, for they
had lost another monopoly.

And indeed in one sense this was so. It must have been so, for as the
range of the State's activity increased, the sphere of religious
influence became relatively less. Marriage, for example, though it still
needed a religious ceremony in common opinion, ceased to need it in the
eye of the law--a change which is familiar to us in our own age. The
pontifex was no longer indispensable to the suitor at law, nor to the
citizen who wished to know on what day he might proceed with his suit.
The college undoubtedly ceased to be the powerful secretly-acting body
in whose hands was the entire _religio_ of the citizen, _i.e._ the
decision of all points on which he might feel the