If we reject, as we conscientiously may, the latest attempts of criticism to post-date the drawing up of the Tables,[567] and in fact to destroy their historical value for us, what is their significance for our present purpose? It is simply that in the middle of the fifth century B.C. the pontifices lost a monopoly--ceased to be the sole depositaries of the rules of law affecting the _pax deorum_, and that new rules are being set down in writing, on the basis of old custom, which more especially affect the relations between the human citizens. For both the _ius divinum_ and the _ius civile_ are to be found in this collection, but the latter is beginning to assert its independence. I think we may say, without much hesitation, that this event, however doubtful its traditional details, did actually save Rome from either of the two consequences to which I alluded just now. The constitution developed itself on lay and not on ecclesiastical lines, leaving the pontifices other work to do, and Roman civil law was eventually able to free itself from the trammels of the _ius divinum_. But for another century the college still found abundant legal work to do, for it was not likely that at Rome, the most conservative of all city-states, it could be quickly set aside, or that the old ideas of law could so speedily disappear. What then was this work? When rules of civil law were written down, it was still necessary to deal with them in two ways which were open to the pontifices, and indeed at this early time to no one else. First, it was necessary to make their provisions effectual by prescribing in each case the proper method of procedure (_actio_). Now it is most important to grasp the fact that procedure in the _ius civile_ was originally of precisely the same nature as procedure in the _ius divinum_, and that precisely the same rigid exactness is indispensable in both. Action and formula in civil law belong to the same class of practices as sacrifice and prayer in religious law, and spring from the same mental soil. Thus, for example, the most familiar case of action and formula in civil law, the _sacramentum_, was, as the name proves, a piece of religious procedure, _i.e._ the deposition in a sacred spot of a sum of money which the suitor in the case would forfeit if he lost it, together with the utterance of a certain formula of words which must be correctly spoken. If we choose to go back so far, we may even see in this combination of formularised act and speech a survival of magical or quasi-magical belief;[568] but this is matter rather for the anthropologist than the historian of religion. The point for us at this moment is that these acts and formulae (_legis actiones_, as they are known in Roman law) could not suddenly or rapidly pass out of the hands of that body of skilled experts which had so long been in sole possession of them; the publication of old and new rules of law in the XII. Tables made no immediate difference in this respect.