It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the college in the early history of Roman law; and for us in particular that importance lies in the fact that they were the sole depositaries of the religious law in the period during which the civil law was being slowly disentangled from it. If we look at the so-called _leges regiae_, which are probably the oldest rules of law that have come down to us (though they may have been made into a collection as late as the very end of the Republic),[558] we see at once that they belong to the _ius divinum_; and there is little doubt that they were extracted from those books of the pontifices which I shall have to explain later on.[559] In other words, it is the maintenance of the _pax deorum_ that they are chiefly concerned with; the crime of the citizen is a violation of that _pax_, and the deity most concerned will punish the community unless some expiatory step is taken to re-establish the right relation between the human and divine inhabitants of the city. "Pellex aram Iunonis ne tangito; si tanget, Iunoni crinibus demissis agnum feminam caedito." "Si parentem puer verberit, ast olle plorassit, puer divis parentum sacer esto."[560] The harlot who touches the altar of Juno, the deity of married women, breaks the _pax_ with that deity, and she must offer a piacular sacrifice to renew it; the son who strikes a parent is made over as the property of the _divi parentum_, _i.e._ those of the whole community,[561] the peaceful relation with whom his act has imperilled. With such rules as these the civil magistrate of the republic can have had nothing to do; they belong to an older period of thought and of government, and survived in the books of the college which under the republic continued to administer the _ius divinum_; for these rules doubtless continued to exist side by side with the civil law as it gradually developed itself, and the necessary modes of expiation were known to the pontifices only. Roman society was indeed so deeply penetrated for many ages with the idea of _religio_--the dread of violating the _pax deorum_,--that the idea of law as a matter of the relation of man to man, as "the interference of the State in the passions and interests of humanity only," must have gained ground by very slow degrees. This primitive religious law then, _i.e._ the regulation of the proper steps to be taken to avoid a breach of the _pax deorum_, was entirely in the hands of the religious authorities, the Rex at first and then the pontifices, as the only experts who could know the secrets of the _ius divinum_; and from their decisions and prescriptions there could be no appeal, simply because there was no individual or body in the State to whom an appeal was conceivable. But after the rule of the Etruscan kings, with all its disturbing influences, and after the revolution which got rid of them, there must have been an age of new ideas and increased mental activity, and also of increasing social