law prepared about half a
century after the abolition of the monarchy; and their existence in
the regal period, while doubtful perhaps as to particular points of
detail, cannot be doubted in the main. Surveying them as a whole,
we recognize the law of a far-advanced agricultural and mercantile
city, marked alike by its liberality and its consistency. In
its case the conventional language of symbols, such as e. g. the
Germanic laws exhibit, has already quite disappeared. There is no
doubt that such a symbolic language must have existed at one time
among the Italians. Remarkable instances of it are to be found in
the form of searching a house, wherein the searcher must, according
to the Roman as well as the Germanic custom, appear without upper
garment merely in his shirt; and especially in the primitive
Latin formula for declaring war, in which we meet with two symbols
occurring at least also among the Celts and the Germans--the "pure
herb" (-herba pura-, Franconian -chrene chruda-) as a symbol of
the native soil, and the singed bloody staff as a sign of commencing
war. But with a few exceptions, in which reasons of religion
protected the ancient usages--to which class the -confarreatio-
as well as the declaration of war by the college of Fetiales
belonged--the Roman law, as we know it, uniformly and on principle
rejects the symbol, and requires in all cases neither more nor
less than the full and pure expression of will. The delivery of an
article, the summons to bear witness, the conclusion of marriage,
were complete as soon as the parties had in an intelligible manner
declared their purpose; it was usual, indeed, to deliver the article
into the hand of the new owner, to pull the person summoned as
a witness by the ear, to veil the bride's head and to lead her in
solemn procession to her husband's house; but all these primitive
practices were already, under the oldest national law of the
Romans, customs legally worthless. In a way entirely analogous to
the setting aside of allegory and along with it of personification
in religion, every sort of symbolism was on principle expelled from
their law. In like manner that earliest state of things presented
to us by the Hellenic as well as the Germanic institutions, wherein
the power of the community still contends with the authority of
the smaller associations of clans or cantons that are merged in
it, is in Roman law wholly superseded; there is no alliance for the
v