As the strongest example of a system that to all appearance has travelled unaltered through two millennia, and yet actually has passed through three whole courses of evolution in three Cultures, with completely different meanings in each, we may take _Roman law_. II _Law_, in the Classical world, _is law made by citizens for citizens_ and presupposes that the state-form is that of the Polis. It was this basic form of public life that led--and self-evidently--to the notion of the person as identical with the man who, added to others like him, made up the body (σῶμα)[62] of the State. From this formal fact of Classical world-feeling grew up the whole structure of Classical law. _“Persona” then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning and valency only in the Classical Culture._ The individual person is a body which belongs to the stock of the Polis. It is with reference to him that the law of the Polis is ordered, downwards into the law of Things--with, as a marginal case, the slave who was body, but not person--and upward into the law of Gods--with, as a marginal case, the hero who from being person had attained godhead and the legal right to a cult, like Lysander and Alexander in the Greek cities and _Divus Julius_ and his successors in Rome. This tendency, becoming more and more definite in the development of Classical jurisprudence, explains also the notion of _capitis deminutio media_, which is so alien to our Western ideas; for we can imagine a person (in our sense of the word) as deprived of certain rights and even of all rights, but the Classical man under this punishment _ceased to be a person_ although living on as a body. And the specifically Classical idea of the thing, _res_, is only intelligible in contrast to and as the object of _persona_.