of Rome governed
itself--a free people, understanding the duty of obedience, clearly
disowning all mystical priestly delusion, absolutely equal in the
eye of the law and one with another, bearing the sharply-defined
impress of a nationality of their own, while at the same time (as
will be afterwards shown) they wisely as well as magnanimously
opened their gates wide for intercourse with other lands. This
constitution was neither manufactured nor borrowed; it grew up
amidst and along with the Roman people. It was based, of course,
upon the earlier constitutions--the Italian, the Graeco-Italian,
and the Indo-Germanic; but a long succession of phases of political
development must have intervened between such constitutions as the
poems of Homer and the Germania of Tacitus delineate and the oldest
organization of the Roman community. In the acclamation of the
Hellenic and in the shield-striking of the Germanic assemblies there
was involved an expression of the sovereign power of the community;
but a wide interval separated forms such as these from the organized
jurisdiction and the regulated declaration of opinion of the Latin
assembly of curies. It is possible, moreover, that as the Roman
kings certainly borrowed the purple mantle and the ivory sceptre
from the Greeks (not from the Etruscans), the twelve lictors also
and various other external arrangements were introduced from abroad.
But that the development of the Roman constitutional law belonged
decidedly to Rome or, at any rate, to Latium, and that the borrowed
elements in it are but small and unimportant, is clearly demonstrated
by the fact that all its ideas are uniformly expressed by words of
Latin coinage. This constitution practically established for all
time the fundamental conceptions of the Roman state; for, as long
as there existed a Roman community, in spite of changes of form
it was always held that the magistrate had absolute command, that
the council of elders was the highest authority in the state, and
that every exceptional resolution required the sanction of the
sovereign or, in other words, of the community of the people.

Notes for Book I Chapter V

1. This was not merely the case under the old religious marriage
(-matrimonium confarreatione-); the civil marriage also (-matrimonium
consensu-), although not in itself giving to the husband proprietary
power over his wife, opened up the way for his acquiring this
proprietary power, inas