We pass over the unimportant wars with the Æquians and Sabines, and over some laws which indeed are of the greatest moment for the study of antiquity. If we could review in detail the debates on the Lex Terentilia concerning the equalization of the two orders, it would be very interesting; but this is impossible, and we can only dwell on quite detached notices. One of them is this, that a trireme was sent out from Rome with three envoys to collect the Greek laws, particularly those of Athens. The credibility of this story has been much discussed. I now retract the opinion which I expressed in the first edition of my Roman History. I had considered as little as my predecessors, that the questions whether the Roman laws have sprung from the Attic ones, or whether envoys went from Rome to Athens, are quite distinct. If the question be put in this way,--“Are the Roman laws borrowed from those of the Athenians?” the answer is a decided “No.” Two laws of Solon only are quoted in support of it, which are said to be met with in the Pandects; yet these are not only quite insignificant, but they are also such as might just as well be borrowed from other codes: we may find as many detached Germanic laws, which coincide with the Roman ones. Nor can we know how far the common descent from the Pelasgian stock may have produced a similarity of laws. All that is distinctive in the Roman law, is not to be found in the Athenian; and distinctive it is with regard to the rights of persons and things. Never had the Greeks the right of paternal authority like the Romans; never the law, that the wife by her marriage entered into the relation of a daughter and co-heiress; never the _jus mancipii_, the formality in the purchase. The difference between property by formal purchase and simple property, between property and hereditary possession, does not exist in the Attic law: the Roman law of inheritance, the Roman law of debt; the Roman system in contracts of borrowing and lending, are quite foreign to the Athenians; the Roman method of procedure is thoroughly different from the Attic. The Attic law belongs to a much later time, when the forms were already very polished; and we behold in Athens a social body which is deficient in the very features which distinguish the Romans. And what we also know of the laws of the other Greek nations has nothing to do with the Romans. If the laws of the states in Magna Græcia should chance to bear any resemblance to those of Rome, this is certainly much rather owing to their having sprung from the same Italian source. Thus in the _tabula Heracleensis_, the law of the _ager limitatus_ seems to have been similar to that which was in force at Rome.