302 HISTORY OF ROMAN LAW 



practical purposes he advocated the absolute power of a prince. His 

 works had much influence on English political writers in the age of 

 Elizabeth and strengthened their arguments in favor of absolutism. 1 

 The Digest was still recognized as a repository of valuable citations, 

 for John Knox made use of it in attacking the " regiment of women," 

 and the civilian Gentile resorted to it when writing in support of 

 James I's royal prerogative. But after the early seventeenth cen- 

 tury its direct authority in political discussion seems to have de- 

 clined. 



The conception of natural law which figures in the works of political 

 theorists both before and after the Renaissance, can trace its history 

 directly back to the texts of Roman law; but, as Mr. Bryce has 

 shown in one of his Studies, 2 the precise scope and force of natural 

 law were so differently viewed by different writers that it would be 

 impossible here to summarize their opinions. It is now well known 

 that the theory of the law of nature, borrowed from the Roman 

 jurists by St. Isidore of Seville, passed from him into Gratian's 

 Decretum, 3 and that by thus becoming embodied in the canon law 

 it was familiar to European thought even before the study of the 

 Roman texts was revived. 



The most famous theory of modern politics, that of the Original 

 or Social Compact, did not become conspicuous till the end of the 

 sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, although 

 in a medieval form it had appeared as far back as the eleventh cen- 

 tury. 4 Its introduction into modern thought is due to the German 

 Johannes Althusius, the Englishman Richard Hooker, and the 

 Dutchman Hugo Grotius. Their position, as stated by Hooker in the 

 Ecclesiastical Polity, was that there are two foundations of public 

 societies; first, natural inclination; secondly, "the order expressly 

 or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their union in living 

 together." This view of the origin of the state was adopted in various 

 forms by Hobbes, Locke, and Blackstone, but its most famous ex- 

 ponent is Rousseau, who carried it to extremes undreamt of by its 

 first authors. Its significance for our present purpose is that it 

 clearly seems to have been suggested by those passages from the 

 Roman jurists which declare law to be communis rei publicae sponsio, 

 and which describe custom having the force of law as tacita civium 

 convention For if law could be regarded as the product of an agree- 

 ment between the citizens of a state, it needed but a short step to 

 find in a similar agreement the origin of the state itself. 



There can thus be no doubt that, at least down to the period of the 



1 Dyer, Machiavelli and the Modern State, pp. 58, 77; Einstein, Italian Re- 

 naissance in England. 



2 Bryce, Studies, &c., pp. 593, 597. 



8 Ibid. p. 594. Carlyle, History of Medieval Political Theory, p. 106. 

 4 Carlyle, op. cit. p. 62. 5 Dig. I, 3, 1, and 1, 3, 35. 



