ROMAN LAW HISTORICAL SCIENCES 301 



Apart from its lessons to the Church and Empire, the civil law sup- 

 plied to the rest of Europe that famous maxim quod principi pla- 

 cuit, etc., which was so unpopular in England. This, in combination 

 with Church doctrines, did much to fortify, if not to produce, the 

 system of absolute monarchy which generally prevailed on the 

 Continent till the French Revolution, and which is even now not 

 entirely dead. 



When we come to consider political theory as expressed in litera- 

 ture prior to the Reformation, it is certain that all writers on the 

 subject owed much to Roman law. Aristotle, the Bible, the Fathers, 

 and the texts of Roman jurists are the armories from which most 

 of their controversial weapons are drawn. The work done by the 

 medieval legists and canonists in developing political theory has 

 not been sufficiently studied. 1 But they were still for the most 

 part too thoroughly possessed with the idea of a single world-empire to 

 be capable of speculating independently as to the origin and nature 

 of sovereignty or of the state. The best known political writings 

 of that period were merely briefs for or against the Pope or his rival. 

 Thus St. Thomas Aquinas argued that, since government was devised 

 to promote the highest good of man, and this consisted in the fruition 

 of God, the head of God's Church on earth should be the supreme 

 ruler. In his De Monarchia on the other hand, Dante maintained the 

 view that the Empire of his day was the legitimate successor of the 

 Roman Empire, and attacked the Pope's pretensions to supremacy. 

 He made a legal argument to show that the alleged Donation of 

 Constantine, if genuine, was invalid, and that Leo could not have had 

 the right to bestow the imperial office on Charles the Great. Dante 

 was convinced that the world had never been so well governed as 

 when it obeyed a single ruler. 2 



During the Renaissance, Bodin and Machiavelli, the founders of 

 the modern science of politics, were able to inquire, with far less 

 partisan bias, into the foundations and functions of the state. But 

 as they worked in the legal atmosphere of the time, which was one 

 of Roman law, they naturally arrived at theories of absolute mon- 

 archy, similar to that which we see depicted in the Corpus luris, 

 though they would both have agreed with Julianus that the ultimate 

 basis of law lies in the popular will. 3 Though Bodin insisted that 

 Roman law was dead and possessed no general authority, his con- 

 ception of the family was purely Roman, and he was unable to 

 conceive of a king as subject to constitutional control. 4 Machiavelli 

 was particularly enamoured of Roman examples in politics. He 

 admired the Roman Republic far more than the Empire, yet for 



1 Maitland, Gierke's Political Theories, &c., p. 101. 2 Convito, iv, 5. 



3 Qig. 1, 3, 32, 1. 



4 Fournol, Bodin predecesseur de Montesquieu, p. 55. 



