count, that they were first
nominated in 465 (Liv. Ep. 11), should simply be retained, and the
otherwise suspicious inference of the falsifier Licinius Macer (in
Liv. vii. 46), which makes mention of them before 450, should be
simply rejected. At first undoubtedly the -tres viri- were nominated
by the superior magistrates, as was the case with most of the later
-magistratus minores-; the Papirian -plebiscitum-, which transferred
the nomination of them to the community (Festus, -v. sacramentum-,
p. 344, Niall.), was at any rate not issued till after the institution
of the office of -praetor peregrinus-, or at the earliest towards the
middle of the sixth century, for it names the praetor -qui inter jus
cives ius dicit-.

12. II. VII. Subject Communities

13. This inference is suggested by what Livy says (ix. 20) as to the
reorganization of the colony of Antium twenty years after it was
founded; and it is self-evident that, while the Romans might very
well impose on the inhabitant of Ostia the duty of settling all his
lawsuits in Rome, the same course could not be followed with townships
like Antium and Sena.

14. II. I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers

15. People are in the habit of praising the Romans as a nation
specially privileged in respect to jurisprudence, and of gazing with
wonder on their admirable law as a mystical gift of heaven; presumably
by way of specially excusing themselves for the worthlessness of
their own legal system. A glance at the singularly fluctuating and
undeveloped criminal law of the Romans might show the untenableness
of ideas so confused even to those who may think the proposition too
simple, that a sound people has a sound law, and a morbid people an
unsound. Apart from the more general political conditions on which
jurisprudence also, and indeed jurisprudence especially, depends, the
causes of the excellence of the Roman civil law lie mainly in two
features: first, that the plaintiff and defendant were specially
obliged to explain and embody in due and binding form the grounds of
the demand and of the objection to comply with it; and secondly, that
the Romans appointed a permanent machinery for the edictal development
of their law, and associated it immediately with practice. By the
former the Romans precluded the pettifogging practices of advocates,
by the latter they obviated incapable law-making, so far as such
things can be prevented at all; and by means of both