Doing Justice to Others 45the Greeks. Th ere has been much speculation as to the extent of stoic infl u-
ence on Roman lawyers. But it may safely be said that there is nothing in Ro-
man law comparable to the grand universal organic stoic vision just outlined.
Roman lawyers were a considerably more practical lot than the stoic phi los o-
phers and largely contented themselves with a far more Earth- bound picture.
Natural law, to them, was essentially what it had been to Aristotle: a set of
norms that were applicable worldwide and not simply to this society or that
one. Th e basic idea was aptly summed up by Cicero, in words attributed to a
speaker in a dialogue. Natural law (ius naturale) was described as “right rea-
son in harmony with nature”— as a body of law that was “spread through the
whole human community, unchanging and eternal.”
Alongside this ius naturale, the Romans devised something that was
largely their own invention. Th is was a body of law called the ius gentium. It
translates as “law of peoples” and sometimes as “law of nations.” But to avoid
possible confusion with other uses of these expressions, it is best to leave ius
gentium in its original Latin, since it did not really correspond to any kind of
law that is commonly recognized today, and since its meaning shift ed sig-
nifi cantly over time (as will be seen).
Th e ius gentium, as devised by the ancient Romans, certainly did not cor-
respond to what would later be called international law. Th at is to say, it was
not a body of law which governed relations between fully in de pen dent states.
It was, however, a law of universal applicability, transcending the boundaries
of any and every individual state. More specifi cally, it was essentially a cor-
pus of private law, governing relations between individual persons who
hailed from diff erent countries. One translation that has been given, for
a usage by Cicero, is “common rules of equity.” In the second century ad,
the noted Roman jurist Gaius described the ius gentium as “the common
law of mankind.”
Th e ius gentium fi rst arose as a contrast to the ius civile (“civil law”),
which was the law of the Roman city- state, that is, Roman law in its true and
original sense. When Roman citizens had legal dealings with one another,
the ius civile was the governing law. Th ere were instances, though, in which
Roman citizens had dealings with foreigners, and these, of course, became
increasingly common as Rome’s po liti cal sway grew ever greater. Similarly,
Roman courts were sometimes called upon to adjudicate disputes in which