The Roman Senate did not alone make law, though it alone through the Prætors interpreted law. As a legislative body it shared its functions with the popular assemblies; its decrees were rather administrative than legislative, but it has never been rivalled, except, perhaps, by the English judges, in its power of expanding the application of existing laws and creating a legal system. This peculiarity of the Roman mind, its conservatism combined with a capacity for readjustment, gave us the Roman Empire; without it the Roman conquests would have gone for nothing. The Greek, far quicker witted than the Roman, was ready to change his laws at a moment’s notice. It was to him an open question whether his state should be democratic or oligarchic; the question could be settled according to convenience, by voting or by force; a new constitution could be framed to suit new emergencies. The Roman mind worked differently; with the Roman the new had, if possible, to be read into the old. The Roman did not become a constitution maker till he had passed under Greek influence, and he was remarkably unsuccessful in the task. He soon abandoned it, but he never failed in his casuistry; there was no conceivable adjustment of human relations which the Roman jurisconsult could not refer back to the Twelve Tables; he never troubled himself as to what was to the advantage of the greatest number, or as to the precise definition of justice; he simply took his law, his precedents, his authorised interpretations, and worked the new circumstances into line with the old forms. Till the Greek influence modified Roman habits the education of the young Roman noblemen was largely legal; while the Greek youth was discussing morality speculatively, the Roman youth was being instructed in the application of law. He sat at the feet of some Mucius Scævola, and heard his solutions of knotty entanglements; the oratory in which he was trained was not the florid rhetoric, which may be addressed successfully to a mob, but forensic oratory addressed to trained intelligence. With the legal temperament, the Roman combined the religious temperament, the habit of looking to authority rather than to speculation as a guide for his actions. The Sibylline books continued to be consulted in form, if not in fact, on occasions of emergency, long after the cultivated Roman had become familiar with the rationalistic speculations of the Greeks and the mathematicians.