In the later Republic and in the Empire we have frequent mention of a civil court which was believed to have had an international origin. Attempts have been made to assign to this court of _recuperatores_ a purely Roman source;[1399] but its essential peculiarities—the large uneven number of jurors, three or five, when the ordinary civil courts knew but one; the rapidity and simplicity of the procedure; the _formula_ framed by a magistrate and not taken from the _legis actiones_ of the civil law—are best explained as survivals of a time when it was a mixed court of international jurisdiction.[1400] The two or four jurors probably represented the contracting states in equal proportions, the third or fifth may have been an arbitrator chosen from another community; the magistrate who gave the _formula_ would have been an official of the town in which the mixed court sat. But the _formula_ implied a system of legal principles, and these could not easily be furnished by the civil law (_jus civile_) of each contracting state. It was not Roman pride that prevented the foreigner from participating in her native law; it was the unwillingness of the foreigner to be made subject to a code characterised by excessive cumbrousness, by danger and by delay, and the counter-objection of the Roman to be the victim of similar disadvantages in the contracting state. No merchant, to whom time meant money, would adopt the cumbrous form of conveyance known as the _mancipatio_, when ownership could be acquired by the simple transfer (_traditio_) known of all nations; none would care to repeat a _formula_ (to be learnt only of the Roman pontiff), the least error in the utterance of which was sufficient to extinguish his claim; and the symbolic acts performed before the praetor, though possibly dear to the Roman mind, could not have been attractive to the foreigner. Convenience dictated a compromise, and this was found in the gradual collection of a body of rights (_jus_) from the customs of “the world” (_gentes_) as known to the Romans. This _jus gentium_, or body of rights possessed by man as a citizen of the world, was a code of private international law, and it cannot be regarded as being even purely Italian. A nation that borrowed its alphabet from a Chalcidian city, that imitated the military organisation of the Hellenes, that traded in the sixth century with Sicily, Sardinia, Libya and Carthage, must have been deeply imbued with the customs of the Greek and Phoenician world. Nor was this code a growth of Rome’s supremacy, for her commercial preceded her political greatness. Its origin dates back to a time probably anterior to the Republic, certainly far earlier than the institution of the praetorship. We have already noticed how for more than a century the same civil judge administered both laws, that of the state and that of the _gentes_,[1401] and how the _jus civile_ was insensibly modified by contact with its younger relative.