ROMAN LAW HISTORICAL SCIENCES 311 



this comprehend all the services of the philologist to legal history. 

 For in comparative jurisprudence it has been shown, as for instance 

 by the present Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of 

 Cambridge, that by tracing the etymology and analyzing the use 

 of words like fas, ius, lex, and their Greek and Teutonic equivalents, 

 much historic light can be thrown on the earliest conceptions of law 

 as unconsciously denned in language. 1 



Thus by investigating etymologies, by tracing obsolete or obscure 

 shades of meaning, and by the preservation of rare antiquities, 

 linguistic scholars both ancient and modern have greatly helped 

 the legal historian. The civil lawyer has on his part supplied to 

 the student of language an immense mass of material of well- 

 authenticated date and authorship, filled with terms from which 

 have directly descended many of the words now used not only by the 

 Latin but also by the Teutonic race, 



VII 



There are two main facts connecting the history of Law and that 

 of Art in ahy given place. The first is that times of great legal 

 activity or legal reform almost always coincide with periods of 

 flourishing art. This may doubtless be accounted for by the fact that 

 law and art are expressions of the same human intellect, and when 

 that intellect is roused to energetic action in one form, it usually is 

 so in others also. The second point is that architecture, sculpture, 

 and painting must inevitably treat in some measure of subjects 

 connected with the law of their country. Any one of those arts 

 may convey legal allusions, just as it may suggest religious or political 

 ideas, and in order to understand those allusions we have to know 

 something about law, politics, or religion, as the case may be. Both 

 points can be well illustrated from the history of Roman law. 



In the first place, there can be no doubt that the most glorious 

 epoch in that history, beginning with the jurists of the Augustan 

 age and ending with those under the Antonines, Septimius Severus, 

 and Caracalla, was also the golden age of Roman architecture and 

 sculpture. For the art of the Augustan period it is enough to cite 

 that wonderful Ara Pads, whose fragments are scattered among 

 several European museums, and the remains of which are now being 

 unearthed under a Roman palace. And the second of those two great 

 centuries was, so far as we are able to judge, the period of culminating 

 splendor both in law and in art. Trajan and Hadrian, so great as 

 legislators, have each left us one of the magnificent monuments of 

 antiquity, a sculptured column in the one case, and a colossal tomb 

 in the other. The memory of Marcus Aurelius, in whose day Roman 

 society was so intensely civilized and modern, has been preserved 

 1 Clark, Practical Jurisprudence, part i, chaps. 1-6. 



