But with changing times, all things changed in Rome. This jurisprudence revered as sacred, but described by Vico as _made up of formulas and phrases_, was well adapted to a rude and primitive people. Ideas had greatly altered in the days of Cicero, who in his speech _pro Murena_ severely satirises a science which, in his eyes, had become ridiculous: "res enim sunt parvæ, prope in singulis literis atque interpunctionibus occupatæ." He looked upon the whole thing as a fraud designed by the priests to secure themselves a monopoly. Was he in the right or the wrong? Vico, in examining a similar question, showed that Cicero was mistaken on this score. Cicero and his contemporaries, he said, lived in too cultivated an age to comprehend rude and primitive jurisprudence; they could not grasp its true significance, but formed their judgment of the ancient laws according to the ideas and principles of their own times. This view, which was first broached in the _Scienza Nuova_, was afterwards accepted by many other writers; and it is now placed beyond a doubt that the primitive Roman law was not the artifice of a learned few, but was a spontaneous and necessary growth among the people with whom it had its origin. At first, custom, clearly distinguished from the law formulated and written, tempered its rigid severity. Good faith and equity, disregarded and rejected by the law, found their sanction in custom, were administered by a separate tribunal, and were always respected, inasmuch as the sentence pronounced by the officiating magistrate was morally, though not legally, binding, and was therefore of great efficacy as the genuine expression of public opinion. The sentence of condemnation could not be carried out by force; but it made the condemned man infamous, and, as a last resort, the magistrate could cite the accused before the people, as the supreme legislator and judge.