A change took place, again, in the meaning of the institutions of property. The civil tenure was no longer a matter of public right, but was dispersed among the various private tenures of the citizens now forming the body of the popular state. "Eminent" tenure no longer signifies the strongest kind of tenure, unencumbered by any actual charge, even a public charge, but applies simply to an estate free from any private charge. Quiritary tenure is no longer that of which the noble was feudal lord and under the obligation to aid his client, the plebeian, if ousted from it: it has become a private civil tenure, capable of being defended by a civil suit as opposed to the bonitary which could be maintained by possession only. The forms of legal process were pruned of the luxurious growth of fictions, solemn formulae and symbolic acts, simplified and rationalised: the intellect, the thought of the legislator was brought into play and the citizens conformed to an idea of a common rational utility, understood as spiritual in value. Causes, which were originally formulae safeguarded by accurate and precise language, became affairs or negotiations solemnised by agreement and, in the case of transference of tenure, by natural tradition; and it was only in contracts said to be completed by word of mouth, that is to say in stipulations, that the safeguards remained "causes" in the strict ancient meaning of the word. Thus the certitude of the law, when the human reason was fully developed, passed into the truth of ideas determined by the circumstances of fact, a "formula devoid of any particular form" (_formula naturae,_ as Varro calls it) which, like a light, informs in all the minutest details of their surface the details of fact over which it extends. In popular republics the ruling principle is the _aequum bonum,_ natural equity. The harsh punishments of the periods of domestic monarchy and heroic society (the laws of the Twelve Tables condemned those who set fire to another's crops to be burnt alive, perjurers to be thrown from the Tarpeian rock, and insolvent debtors to be cut in pieces while living) were replaced by milder penalties, since the multitude, whose members are weak, is naturally disposed to clemency. Laws, which under the aristocracy were few, inflexible and religiously observed, multiplied under the democracy and became liable to change and modification. The Spartans, who preserved their aristocracy, said that at Athens they had many laws and wrote them; at Sparta few, but they obeyed them. The Roman plebs, like the Athenian, passed new laws every day, and the attempt by Sulla, the leader of the noble party, to reduce them by the institution of "_quaestiones perpetuae_" or permanent courts was in vain, for after his time laws were again multiplied.