The result of the first struggles, in which the point at issue was according to Vico the bonitary possession of land (a right already recognised in the constitution of Servius, but cancelled by the nobles in return for arrears of rent), is seen in the tribunate, and later, when the plebeians claimed the right of quiritary tenure, in the laws of the Twelve Tables, ratifying this plebeian victory. But the law of the Twelve Tables represented at the same time the victory of written law, the end of the secrecy with which the laws had been fenced round by the patricians, who alone knew, understood, interpreted and therefore applied them as they thought fit. This publication and codification of a written law cannot have been benevolently granted by the patricians out of that anxiety "not to despise the wishes of the plebs" of which Livy speaks; rather they must have resisted it with all the stubbornness which Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes and expresses in the phrase "_mores patrios servandos, leges ferri non oportere_" (our fathers' customs must be preserved, and laws must not be passed). Later historians decorated the origin of the Twelve Tables with various legends. They told, among other things, of the mission sent by the decemvirs to Athens to bring back new laws: a tale given by Livy and Dionysius, but unknown to Polybius and discredited by Cicero. How, in the savage aloofness of primitive nations, between whom oral communication could only have been instituted by the necessities of warfare, alliances and commerce, could the fame of Solon's wisdom have crossed the seas from distant Attica to Rome? How could the Romans of that time have possessed such accurate knowledge of the quality of Athenian law as to believe it capable of setting at rest the strife between their plebeians and their nobles? How could ambassadors have travelled between Greece and those Romans whom seventy-two years later the Greeks of Tarentum could still maltreat as strangers? And what shall we say of ambassadors who returned carrying with them the Greek laws from Athens but without knowing what they meant; so that but for the coincidence by which Hermodorus the pupil of Heraclitus, an exile from his country, happened to be in Rome, the Romans would have been unable to make any use of this unintelligible and inaccessible treasure? Again, how could Hermodorus have translated the laws into Latin of such purity that Diodorus Siculus pronounced it devoid of the slightest taint of Hellenism, and with a perfection unattained by any subsequent writer of any period in a translation from the Greek? How did he contrive to clothe Greek ideas in Latin words so appropriate (for instance, _auctoritas_) that Greeks, Dio Cassius among them, declare that their own language has no corresponding words by which to explain them? Heraclitus's letter to Hermodorus must have been conveyed by the same mail that served Pythagoras in his distant