From this early conception the idea of human legislation gradually emerged. Not daring on his own responsibility to change a traditional usage which the people held sacred, the magistrate found it expedient to obtain their consent to any serious departure,[1053] with a view not to legalizing the proposal, but to pledging the people to its practical adoption. When and how the primitive acclamation gave way to the orderly vote of the comitia curiata cannot be ascertained from the sources.[1054] After this stage was reached, the transaction between king and people had the following form: “I ask you, quirites, whether you will consent to, and consider it right, that T. Valerius be a son to L. Titus as rightfully and legally as if born of the father and mother of the family of the latter, and that the latter have the power of life and death over the former as a father over his son. These (questions) in the form in which I have pronounced them, thus, quirites, I ask you.”[1055] The magistrate brought his formulated request before the people (legem ferre), who accepted it (legem accipere); the question (rogatio) was directed not to the assembly as a whole but to the component citizens, who individually replied ut rogas, “yes,” or antiquo, “no.”[1056] By this procedure the citizens bound themselves to the acceptance of the proposition on an oral promise, which was the strongest form of obligation known to them. Herein is involved the fundamental idea of lex, which was not a command addressed by the sovereign to the people or a contract between ruler and ruled, but an obligation which the citizens took upon themselves at the request of the magistrate.[1057] The verb iubere, which designates the people’s part (populus iubet) in the passing of laws and resolutions, did not originally have the meaning “to order,” which belonged to it in the age of Cicero. Some have derived it from ius habere, “to regard as right;”[1058] others from judh, an extension of the root ju, “to bind.”[1059] In either case it seems to mean no more than to accept or hold as right or as binding. In its widest sense lex denotes any obligation which one party takes upon himself on the offer of another. In this meaning it may apply to a business contract,[1060] in which alone the obligations are reciprocal, to the instruction imposed by a superior magistrate upon an inferior,[1061] to the auspicium which the magistrate formulates and the god accepts,[1062] to the ordinance which the subject, without being consulted, receives willingly or unwillingly from the ruler (lex data),[1063] as well as to the statute established by the question of the magistrate and the affirmative answer of the citizens (lex rogata). The leges of the community, with which alone the present discussion is concerned, were distinguished as publicae.[1064] A lex of the kind was not necessarily general,[1065] but applied as readily to an individual citizen[1066] as to the entire body, to a