_Law_, in the Classical world, _is law made by citizens for citizens_ and presupposes that the state-form is that of the Polis. It was this basic form of public life that led--and self-evidently--to the notion of the person as identical with the man who, added to others like him, made up the body (σῶμα)[62] of the State. From this formal fact of Classical world-feeling grew up the whole structure of Classical law.

_“Persona” then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning and valency only in the Classical Culture._ The individual person is a body which belongs to the stock of the Polis. It is with reference to him that the law of the Polis is ordered, downwards into the law of Things--with, as a marginal case, the slave who was body, but not person--and upward into the law of Gods--with, as a marginal case, the hero who from being person had attained godhead and the legal right to a cult, like Lysander and Alexander in the Greek cities and _Divus Julius_ and his successors in Rome. This tendency, becoming more and more definite in the development of Classical jurisprudence, explains also the notion of _capitis deminutio media_, which is so alien to our Western ideas; for we can imagine a person (in our sense of the word) as deprived of certain rights and even of all rights, but the Classical man under this punishment _ceased to be a person_ although living on as a body. And the specifically Classical idea of the thing, _res_, is only intelligible in contrast to and as the object of _persona_.

As Classical religion was State religion through and through, there is no distinction made as to the fount of law; real law and divine law were made, like personal law, by the citizen, and the relations of things and of gods to persons were precise and definite. Now, it was a fact of decisive significance for the Classical jurisprudence that it was always the product of immediate public experience--and, moreover, not the professional experience of the jurists, but the practical everyday experience of men who counted in political and economic life generally. The man who followed the public career in Rome had necessarily to be jurist, general, administrator, and financial manager. When he gave judgment as prætor, he had behind him a wide experience of many fields other than law. A judicial _class_, professionally (let alone theoretically) specialized in law as its sole activity, was entirely unknown to the Classical. The whole outlook of the later jurisprudence was determined by this fact. The Romans were here neither systematists nor historians nor theorists, but just splendidly practical. Their jurisprudence is an _empirical science of individual cases_, a refined technique, and not in the least a structure of abstractions.[63]

It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to one another as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole development is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such, and Greek law as a unity never existed at all. Although Greek-speaking cities very often had similar laws, this did not alter the fact that the law of each was its own and no other’s. Never did the idea of a general Doric, still less a general Hellenic, legislation arise. Such notions were wholly alien to Classical thought. The _jus civile_ applied only to Quirites--foreigners, slaves and the whole world outside the city[64] simply did not count in the eyes of the law, whereas even the _Sachsenspiegel_[65] evidences already our own deep-felt idea that there can only really be one law. Until far into Imperial times the strict distinction was maintained between the _jus civile_ of citizens and the _jus gentium_ for “other people” who came within the cognizance of Rome’s jurisdiction as sojourners.[66] (It need hardly be added that this “law of nations” has no sort of resemblance to that which we call by the same name.) It was only because Rome as a unit-city attained--as under other conditions Alexandria might have attained--to “Imperium” over the Classical world that Roman law became pre-eminent, not because of its intrinsic superiority, but firstly through Rome’s political success and afterwards because of Rome’s monopoly of practical experience on the large scale. The formation of a general Classical jurisprudence of Hellenistic cast--if we are entitled to call by that name an affinity of spirit in a large number of separate legal systems--falls in a period when Rome was still politically a third-rate power. And when Roman law began to assume bigger forms, this was only one aspect of the fact that Roman intellect had subjugated Hellenism. The work of forming later Classical law passed from Hellenism to Rome--i.e., from a sum of city-states, which one and all had been impressively made aware of their individual impotence, to one single city whose whole activity was in the end devoted to the upholding and exploitation of an effective primacy. Thus it came about that Hellenism never formed a jurisprudence in the Greek tongue. When the Classical world entered upon a stage in which it was ripe for this science (the latest of all), there was but _one_ lawgiving city that counted in the matter.

In reality, insufficient regard has been paid to the fact that Greek and Roman law are not parallel in time but successive. Roman law is the younger and presupposes the long experience of the elder;[67] it was built up, in fact, late and, with this exemplar before it, very swiftly. It is not without significance that the flowering-time of the Stoic philosophy, which deeply affected juridical ideas, followed that of Greek, but preceded that of Roman, law.