46 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)both parties were non- Roman. It was for the resolution of these disputes in-
volving foreigners that the ius gentium was devised.
To the best of our knowledge, the fi rst signifi cant step in this pro cess was
the creation of a new legal offi cial in Rome called the praetor peregrinus (or
peregrine praetor) in 242 bc. Th e task of this offi cial was to hear disputes
in which one or both parties were noncitizens of Rome. Since the civil law
of Rome could not be applied to noncitizens of Rome, the praetor peregri-
nus took to deciding these cases on the basis of what might be called gen-
eral principles of law. Th at entailed the identifi cation of rules that were
common to states in general (or at least were thought to be). Once these
were identifi ed, they would be applied to the dispute at hand. Th is corpus
of common or general rules of law, emerging from the adjudications of the
praetor peregrinus, became the ius gentium— the law of peoples in general.
It would seem that, in practice, this original ius gentium was chiefl y con-
cerned with commercial transactions such as sales of goods.
A few words must be said about the relationship between the ius gentium
and natural law. Th ey were alike in one highly important respect: that both
were universal in scope, in contrast to national legal systems, which applied
only to the individual states that promulgated them. By extension, it could
be said that natural law and the ius gentium were alike, too, in that both
were animated by a vision of the entire human race as forming, in some real
sense, a single community— a moral or ethical community in the one case,
and a legal one in the other. Th ey were also alike in that, for both of them,
the primary application was to the everyday conduct of ordinary, private
individuals. Consequently, neither of them, in their initial stages, had any
strong connection to what would later be called international law.
At the same time, there were some important diff erences between the two
bodies of law. If the ius naturale was the distinctive creation of phi los o phers,
the ius gentium was the gift of lawyers. Where natural law was based on
high- minded principles of ethics or (in the stoic case) on abstruse systems of
natural philosophy, the ius gentium was distinctly practical and down- to-
earth in character. Its basis was human consensus, rather than the laws of
nature per se. In other words, the ius gentium was a man- made law, and
natural law was not. Natural law was, in some sense or other, part of nature
itself, part of the fabric of the universe— and, as such, no more a creation of
humans than was nature itself.