In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied
in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly
by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective
conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character
of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving
Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea
of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The Italo-Hellenic
religion stood forth in its outlines ready-made; how much
in this very department men were conscious of having gone beyond
the specifically Roman point of view and advanced towards
an Italo-Hellenic quasi-nationality, is shown by the distinction made
in the already-mentioned theology of Varro between the "common" gods,
that is, those acknowledged by Romans and Greeks, and the special gods
of the Roman community.

Law of the Empire

So far as concerns the field of criminal and police law,
where the government more directly interferes and the necessities
of the case are substantially met by a judicious legislation,
there was no difficulty in attaining, in the way of legislative action,
that degree of material uniformity which certainly was in this department
needful for the unity of the empire. In the civil law again,
where the initiative belongs to commercial intercourse and merely
the formal shape to the legislator, the code for the united empire,
which the legislator certainly could not have created, had been already
long since developed in a natural way by commercial intercourse itself.
The Roman urban law was still indeed legally based on the embodiment
of the Latin national law contained in the Twelve Tables.
Later laws had doubtless introduced various improvements
of detail suited to the times, among which the most important
was probably the abolition of the old inconvenient mode
of commencing a process through standing forms of declaration
by the parties(104) and the substitution of an instruction drawn up
in writing by the presiding magistrate for the single juryman
(formula): but in the main the popular legislation had only piled upon
that venerable foundation an endless chaos of special laws
long since in great part antiquated and forgotten, which can
only be compared to the English statute-law. The attempts to impart
to them scientific shape and system had certainly rendered
the tortuous paths of the old civil law accessible, and thrown light
upon