The Basilica Julia In Rome, begun by Caesar in 54 BC and completed by Augustus. One of the great judicial buildings of the capital, it housed the civil
court of the centumviri and was divided by wooden screens so that four cases could be heard simultaneously; but for cases of exceptional importance the
whole hall was employed. Only the foundations remain.
Because Roman officials spent so much time in jurisdiction it was natural that Roman law should become more complicated and more sophisticated. The
natural rule that jurisdiction gravitates to the highest available authority operated to increase the workload of governors, the great prefects at Rome, and
the Emperor himself, and to hasten the adoption of Roman law. Even in the reign of Augustus, Strabo can already write that Crete, despite its own
venerable legal tradition, had come, like all the provinces, to use the laws of Rome (10.4.22). And the bitterest realism about conditions in the Roman