[Footnote 17: Sigonius, _De Antiq. Juris Civ. Rom_., Bk. I, ch. 2.] [Footnote 18: Hume's _Hist, of Eng_., I, ch. 4: IV, ch. 61.] [Footnote 19: _Esprit des lois_, Liv. 27, c. 1.] [Footnote 20: _Roman Hist_., II, 164; III, 175 and 211.] [Footnote 21: Lycurgus and Numa, II; Cicero, _De Repub_., II, 9.] [Footnote 22: Muirhead, _Roman Law_, 46 and note--"uti legasset suae rei ita jus esto."] [Footnote 23: Muirhead, 92-96.] [Footnote 24: Niebuhr, I.] [Footnote 25: Momm., I, 126; Ihne, I; Nitzsch, _Geschichte der römischen Republik_, 52; Lange, _Römische Geschichte_, I, 18.] [Footnote 26: Dureau de la Malle, _Mém. sur les pop. de l'Italie, 500 et seq_.] SEC. 2.--QUIRITARIAN OWNERSHIP. Citizenship was the first requisite to the right of property in Roman territory. This rule, although invariable and inherent in the Roman state, bent under the influence of international politics or the philosophy of law, yet its severity affords us a notable characteristic of the law of ancient Rome. Cicero and Gaius have preserved to us an important monument of this law in a fragment of the Twelve Tables which proclaims the solemn principle, _adversus hostem aeterna auctoritas esto.[1] Hostis_ in the old Latin language was synonymous with stranger, _perigrinus_[2] This Roman name was moreover applied to a person who had forfeited the protection of the law by reason of a criminal condemnation, and who was therefore designated _peregrinus_.[3] _Auctoritas_ also had in old Latin a different signification from what it has in later Latin. It expressed the idea of the right to claim and defend in equity. It was very nearly equivalent to the right of property.[4] The sense of the Roman law was, then, that the _peregrinus_ could not bar or proceed against a Roman, a disposition somewhat similar to the old law of England.[5] And as it was necessary to be a citizen in order to acquire by the civil and solemn means which dominated the law of property in Rome, it followed that the _peregrini_ were excluded from all right to property in land by these laws. This exclusive legislation for a long time governed Europe and did not disappear even from the Code Napoleon of 1819.[6] We have a forcible example of the severity of the old Roman law in this regard in the text of Gaius,--_Aut enim ex jure quiritium unusquisque dominus erat, aut non intelligebatur dominus._[7]