The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (autobiographies to read txt) 📕

the Latin -carcer- in the Sicilian —karkaron—. Since it is philologically certain that both words were originally Latin, their occurrence in the local dialect of Sicily becomes an important testimony to the frequency of the dealings of Latin traders in the island, which led to their borrowing money there and becoming liable to that imprisonment for debt, which was everywhere in the earlier systems of law the consequence of the non-repayment of a loan. Conversely, the name of the Syracusan prison, "stone-quarries" or —latomiai—, was transferred at an early period to the enlarged Roman state-prison, the -lautumiae-.

Character of the Roman Law

We have derived our outline of these institutions mainly from the earliest record of the Roman common law prepared about half a century after the abolition of the monarchy; and their existence in the regal period, while doubtful perhaps as to particular points of detail, cannot be doubted in the main. Surveying them as a whole, we recognize the law of a far-advanced agricultural and mercantile city, marked alike by its liberality and its consistency. In its case the conventional language of symbols, such as e. g. the Germanic laws exhibit, has already quite disappeared. There is no doubt that such a symbolic language must have existed at one time among the Italians. Remarkable instances of it are to be found in the form of searching a house, wherein the searcher must, according to the Roman as well as the Germanic custom, appear without upper garment merely in his shirt; and especially in the primitive Latin formula for declaring war, in which we meet with two symbols occurring at least also among the Celts and the Germans—the "pure herb" (-herba pura-, Franconian -chrene chruda-) as a symbol of the native soil, and the singed bloody staff as a sign of commencing war. But with a few exceptions, in which reasons of religion protected the ancient usages—to which class the -confarreatio- as well as the declaration of war by the college of Fetiales belonged—the Roman law, as we know it, uniformly and on principle rejects the symbol, and requires in all cases neither more nor less than the full and pure expression of will. The delivery of an article, the summons to bear witness, the conclusion of marriage, were complete as soon as the parties had in an intelligible manner declared their purpose; it was usual, indeed, to deliver the article into the hand of the new owner, to pull the person summoned as a witness by the ear, to veil the bride's head and to lead her in solemn procession to her husband's house; but all these primitive practices were already, under the oldest national law of the Romans, customs legally worthless. In a way entirely analogous to the setting aside of allegory and along with it of personification in religion, every sort of symbolism was on principle expelled from their law. In like manner that earliest state of things presented to us by the Hellenic as well as the Germanic institutions, wherein the power of the community still contends with the authority of the smaller associations of clans or cantons that are merged in it, is in Roman law wholly superseded; there is no alliance for the vindication of rights within the state, to supplement the state's imperfect aid, by mutual offence and defence; nor is there any serious trace of vengeance for bloodshed, or of the family property restricting the individual's power of disposal. Such institutions must probably at one time have existed among the Italians; traces of them may perhaps be found in particular institutions of ritual, e. g. in the expiatory goat, which the involuntary homicide was obliged to give to the nearest of kin to the slain; but even at the earliest period of Rome which we can conceive this stage had long been transcended. The clan and the family doubtless were not annihilated in the Roman community; but the theoretical as well as the practical omnipotence of the state in its own sphere was no more limited by them than by the freedom which the state granted and guaranteed to the burgess. The ultimate foundation of law was in all cases the state; freedom was simply another expression for the right of citizenship in its widest sense; all property was based on express or tacit transference by the community to the individual; a contract was valid only so far as the community by its representatives attested it, a testament only so far as the community confirmed it. The provinces of public and private law were definitely and clearly discriminated: the former having reference to crimes against the state, which immediately called for the judgment of the state and always involved capital punishment; the latter having reference to offences against a fellow-burgess or a guest, which were mainly disposed of in the way of compromise by expiation or satisfaction made to the party injured, and were never punished with the forfeit of life, but, at most, with the loss of freedom. The greatest liberality in the permission of commerce and the most rigorous procedure in execution went hand in hand; just as in commercial states at the present day the universal right to draw bills of exchange appears in conjunction with a strict procedure in regard to them. The burgess and the client stood in their dealings on a footing of entire equality; state-treaties conceded a comprehensive equality of rights also to the guest; women were placed completely on a level in point of legal capacity with men, although restricted in action; the boy had scarcely grown up when he received at once the most comprehensive powers in the disposal of his estate, and every one who could dispose at all was as sovereign in his own sphere as was the state in public affairs. A feature eminently characteristic was the system of credit. There did not exist any credit on landed security, but instead of a debt on mortgage the step which constitutes at present the final stage in mortgage-procedure —the delivery of the property from the debtor to the creditor—took place at once. On the other hand personal credit was guaranteed in the most summary, not to say extravagant fashion; for the lawgiver entitled the creditor to treat his insolvent debtor like a thief, and granted to him in entire legislative earnest what Shylock, half in jest, stipulated for from his mortal enemy, guarding indeed by special clauses the point as to the cutting off too much more carefully than did the Jew. The law could not have more clearly expressed its design, which was to establish at once an independent agriculture free of debt and a mercantile credit, and to suppress with stringent energy all merely nominal ownership and all breaches of fidelity. If we further take into consideration the right of settlement recognized at an early date as belonging to all the Latins,(8) and the validity which was likewise early pronounced to belong to civil marriage,(9) we shall perceive that this state, which made the highest demands on its burgesses and carried the idea of subordinating the individual to the interest of the whole further than any state before or since has done, only did and only could do so by itself removing the barriers to intercourse and unshackling liberty quite as much as it subjected it to restriction. In permission or in prohibition the law was always absolute. As the foreigner who had none to intercede for him was like the hunted deer, so the guest was on a footing of equality with the burgess. A contract did not ordinarily furnish a ground of action, but where the right of the creditor was acknowledged, it was so all-powerful that there was no deliverance for the poor debtor, and no humane or equitable consideration was shown towards him. It seemed as if the law found a pleasure in presenting on all sides its sharpest spikes, in drawing the most extreme consequences, in forcibly obtruding on the bluntest understanding the tyrannic nature of the idea of right. The poetical form and the genial symbolism, which so pleasingly prevail in the Germanic legal ordinances, were foreign to the Roman; in his law all was clear and precise; no symbol was employed, no institution was superfluous. It was not cruel; everything necessary was performed without much ceremony, even the punishment of death; that a free man could not be tortured was a primitive maxim of Roman law, to obtain which other peoples have had to struggle for thousands of years. Yet this law was frightful in its inexorable severity, which we cannot suppose to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for it was really the law of the people; more terrible than Venetian -piombi- and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors' towers of the rich. But the greatness of Rome was involved in, and was based upon, the fact that the Roman people ordained for itself and endured a system of law, in which the eternal principles of freedom and of subordination, of property and of legal redress, reigned and still at the present day reign unadulterated and unmodified.

Notes for Book I Chapter XI

1. This "chariot-seat"—philologically no other explanation can well be given (comp. Servius ad Aen. i. 16)—is most simply explained by supposing that the king alone was entitled to ride in a chariot within the city (v. The King)—whence originated the privilege subsequently accorded to the chief magistrate on solemn occasions—and that originally, so long as there was no elevated tribunal, he gave judgment, at the comitium or wherever else he wished, from the chariot-seat.

2. I. V. The Housefather and His Household

3. The story of the death of king Tatius, as given by Plutarch (Rom. 23, 24), viz. that kinsmen of Tatius had killed envoys from Laurentum; that Tatius had refused the complaint of the kinsmen of the slain for redress; that they then put Tatius to death; that Romulus acquitted the murderers of Tatius, on the ground that murder had been expiated by murder; but that, in consequence of the penal judgments of the gods that simultaneously fell upon Rome and Laurentum, the perpetrators of both murders were in the sequel subjected to righteous punishment—this story looks quite like a historical version of the abolition of blood-revenge, just as the introduction of the -provocatio- lies at the foundation of the myth of the Horatii. The versions of the same story that occur elsewhere certainly present considerable variations, but they seem to be confused or dressed up.

4. The -mancipatio- in its developed form must have been more recent than the Servian reform, as the selection of mancipable objects, which had for its aim the fixing of agricultural property, shows, and as even tradition must have assumed, for it makes Servius the inventor of the balance. But in its origin the -mancipatio- must be far more ancient; for it primarily applies only to objects which are acquired by grasping with the hand, and must therefore in its earliest form have belonged to the epoch when property consisted essentially in slaves and cattle (-familia pecuniaque-). The enumeration of those objects which had to be acquired by -mancipatio-, falls accordingly to be ranked as a Servian innovation; the -mancipatio- itself, and consequently the use also of the balance and of copper, are older. Beyond doubt -mancipatio- was originally the universal form of purchase, and occurred in the case of all articles even after the Servian reform; it was only a misunderstanding of later ages which put upon the rule, that certain articles had to be transferred by -mancipatio-, the construction that these articles only and no others could be so transferred.

5. Viz. for the year of ten months one twelfth part of the capital (-uncia-), which amounts to 8 1/3 per cent for the year of ten, and 10 per cent for the fear of twelve, months.

6. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium

7. I. VI. Dependents and Guests.

8. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium

9. I. VI. Class of —Metoeci— Subsisting by the Side of the Community

CHAPTER XII

Religion

Roman Religion

The Roman world of gods, as we have already indicated,(1) was a higher counterpart, an ideal reflection, of the earthly Rome, in which the little and the great were alike repeated with painstaking exactness. The state and the clan, the individual phenomenon of nature as well as the individual mental operation, every man, every place and object, every act even falling within the sphere of Roman law, reappeared in the Roman world of gods; and, as earthly things come and go in perpetual