ABSTRACT
THE Law of the Lower Empire inherited its general idea of obligation from classical Law and borrowed from Gaius the classification (not a very happy one because incomplete and inexact) of obligations as delictual, contractual, quasi-delictual and quasi-contractual (ex delicto, ex contractu, quasi ex delicto, quasi ex contractu). In the amendments in detail which it introduced under this head it confined itself most often to a compromise between the more flexible and apparently more advanced methods of the Law of the Hellenistic countries and the logical and traditional ordinances of Roman Law. In fact the innovations were far more redolent than the ancient forms of the methods and subtleties of the schools. But the legislation of the Emperors was dominated above all by the anxiety, visible as early as the third century and remarkably exaggerated afterwards, to satisfy the requirements of humanitarianism, of a false and stupid sentimentality. Hence the continual digressions from the Common Law, which was so far superseded as to become in some matters the exception rather than the rule, owing to the gradual invasion of juridical antilogies and distortions, and to the demagogic bias of the constitutions, which were closely analogous in their object and result to what we in our time call the lois sociales.
