[25] Sample questions which were debated to bring out the fine distinctions in Roman Law and Ethics were:
(a) Was a slave about whose neck a master had hung the leather or golden token (worn by free youths only), in order to smuggle him past the boundary, freed when he reached Roman soil wearing this insignia of freedom?
(b) If a stranger buys a prospective draught of fishes and the fisherman draws up a casket of jewels, does the stranger own the jewels?
[26] In the later centuries of the Empire, people went to hear a man who could orate or declaim, as people now do to hear a great political orator, a revivalist preacher, or a popular actor or singer. A form of amusement for distinguished travelers passing through a city was to have some one orate before them. "This power of using words for mere pleasurable effect," says Professor Dill, in his Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, "on the most trivial or the most extravagantly absurd themes, was for many ages, in both West and East, esteemed the highest proof of talent and cultivation."
[27] Each Greek rhetorician in Rome was given one hundred sestertia (about $4000) yearly from the Imperial Treasury, Quintilian probably being one of the first to receive a state salary.
[28] "He [Claudius] was also attentive to provide a liberal education for the sons of their chieftains;… and his attempts were attended with such success that they, who lately disdained to make use of the Roman language, were now ambitious of becoming eloquent. Hence the Roman habit began to be held in honor, and the toga was frequently worn." Tacitus's Account of Britain, Agricola, chap. 21.
[29] England offers us the nearest modern analogy. This was one of the last of the great European nations to establish popular education, but for centuries previous thereto the great private, tuition, grammar schools of England—Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and others—together with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, prepared a succession of leaders for the State—men who have steered England's destinies at home and abroad and made her a great world power.
[30] This grew up, as all law grows, by enacted laws and decisions of the courts, and in time came to be an enormous body of law. Lacking the printed law books and indices of to-day, to obtain a knowledge of Roman law became a formidable task. Finally the practical Roman mind codified it, and reduced it to system and order. The Theodosian Code, of 438 A.D., and the Justinian Code, of 528 and 534 A.D., were the final results. These codes were compact, capable of duplication with relative ease, and later became the standard textbooks throughout the Middle Ages. The great importance of these codifications may be appreciated when we know that almost all the original laws and decisions from which they were compiled have been lost.
[31] The Romanic countries—France, Spain, Italy—have drawn their law most completely from the Justinian Code. Due to Spanish and French occupation of parts of America, Roman legal ideas also entered here, the Louisiana Code of 1824 being Roman in law and technical expressions and spirit, though English in language. Spanish and Portuguese settlement of the South American continent has carried Roman law there.
[32] The Roman alphabet is the alphabet of all North and South America, Australia, Africa, and all of Europe except Russia, Greece, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and a few minor Slavic and Teutonic peoples. Even in Germany and Austria, Roman letters were rapidly superseding the more difficult German letters in the printing of papers and books for the better-educated classes before the Great War. In India, Siam, China, and Japan, Roman letters are also being increasingly used.