The material character of the first contracts and the forcible character of early legal processes were gradually modified as time went on, and became symbolic. As the fiction of force in marriage-rites recalled the actual force with which the giants dragged the first women into caves, so no less the ceremonies of _mancipatio, usucapio_ and vengeance had formerly been acts really performed. _Mancipatio_ was performed as we said with the actual hand, that is with real force; for instance, in occupation, the original source of all rights of possession; _usucapio_ by the permanent planting of the body upon the thing possessed; vengeance was originally a duel or a _"conditio,"_ private retaliation. Then they became ceremonies or fictions: _mancipatio_ became a civil transference with solemn acts and phrases (_si quis nexum faciet mancipiumque uti lingua nuncupassit ita ius esto_--"If any one makes a thing bond to him and his possession, let the law be so that he publish it with his tongue"); _usucapio_ a tenure which is supposed to last as long as life; retaliation a series of personal actions accompanied by a solemn declaration of them to the debtor. There were worn in the forum as many masks as there were legal personalities, and under the "person" or mask of a paterfamilias were hidden all the children and all the slaves of the house. Instead of abstract forms, which were not yet thought of, living bodily forms were used. Heredity for instance was invented as mistress of hereditary property, and imagined to exist completely in every particular piece of inherited goods; the idea of indivisible right again, was materialised in the glebe or clod of earth presented to the judge with the formula _"hunc fundum"_ This ancient jurisprudence was throughout poetical; its fictions turned facts into falsehoods and falsehoods into facts, made the unborn live, the living dead, and the dead to survive in their posterity. It created numbers of empty legal personalities without subjects (_iura imaginaria_), rights invented by the imagination; and the formulae in which the laws were expressed were called because of their strict rhythm of such and so many words "verses"_--carmina._ The fragments of the Twelve Tables, if carefully considered, end their sentences for the most part in an Adonian verse, which is ultimately a fragment of the hexameter metre; and Cicero, realising this, begins his "Laws" with the sentence _Deos caste adeunto pietatem adhibento._ Cicero also tells us that the Roman boys used to sing the laws of the twelve tables "like a regular song" (_tanquam necessarium carmen_), and Aelian says the same of the Cretan children and the laws of Minos. The Egyptian laws according to one tradition were "poems of the goddess Isis," and those given by Lycurgus to the Spartans and by Draco to the Athenians were formulated in verse. The whole of the ancient Roman law was a "serious poem," or as Vico says elsewhere a "kind of Roman