What we see in these surviving laws is the evolution of the idea of murder as a crime, as something which harms the state and is to be regulated by the state, in parallel with the evolution of the Roman state into a centralised, military-backed absolute monarchy. This is not a coincidence. As the power of the state came more and more to rest on just one man, the emperor, the state slowly took control of the power to kill and reduced the power of the family and the individual.
