History of Law and Court system in ancient Rome by Theodor Mommsen (1857)

Law and court

1857

History alone cannot illustrate national life in its infinite diversity; it must be sufficient to represent the development of the whole.

The creation and action, the thinking and writing of the individual, no matter how much they are dominated by the influence of the national spirit, are not part of history.

Nevertheless, the attempt to indicate these conditions, even if only in the most general outlines, seems necessary for this oldest, historically almost lost time because the deep gulf that separates our thinking and feeling from that of the ancient civilized peoples is closing in this area alone can be brought to some degree of awareness.

Our tradition, with its confused folk names and clouded legends, is like the dry leaves that we struggle to understand that they were once green; Instead of letting the unpleasant speech whirl through this and classifying the scraps of humanity, the Choni and Oenotrians, the Siculi and Pelasgians, it would be better to ask how the real folk life of ancient Italy in legal relations, the ideal in the Religion was expressed, how people farmed and traded, where writing came to the people and the other elements of education.

As poor as our knowledge is here, especially for the Roman people, and even more so for that of the Sabellers and the Etruscans, even the scant and patchy information will give the reader an idea or at least a hunch instead of a name. The main result of such a consideration, to anticipate this right here, can be summarized in the sentence that the Italians and especially the Romans preserved relatively less of the prehistoric conditions than any other Indo-European tribe.

Bows and arrows, chariots, women’s inability to own property, the purchase of wives, primitive forms of burial, blood revenge, gender constitution struggling with communal power, living symbolism of nature – all of these and countless related phenomena must probably also be assumed to be the basis of Italian civilization; But where they first appear to us clearly, they have already disappeared without a trace, and only a comparison of the related tribes tells us about their former existence. In this respect, Italian history begins at a much later stage of civilization than, for example, Greek and German history and inherently has a relatively modern character.

The legal statutes of most Italian tribes have been lost: only Latin land law has come down to us in Roman tradition.

All jurisdiction is summarized in the community, that is, in the king, who holds court or “commandment” (ius) on the judgment days (dies fasti) on the judge’s stage (tribunal) of the Dingstaette, sitting on the chariot chair (sella curulis) (1 ); At his side are his messengers (lictores), and in front of him are the accused or the parties (rei).

It is true that the master initially decides about the servants, and the father, husband or closest male relative decides about the women; But servants and women were not initially considered members of the community. The paternal authority also competed with the royal jurisdiction over sons and grandchildren who were subject to the household; But this was not an actual jurisdiction, but merely an outgrowth of the father’s right of ownership of the children.

Nowhere do we find any trace of the genders having their own jurisdiction or, in general, of any jurisdiction not derived from the royal one. As far as self-help and especially blood revenge is concerned, there is perhaps still a legendary echo of the original statute that the killing of the murderer or the person who illegally protects him is justified by the murdered person’s neighbors; But the very same legends describe this statute as reprehensible (2) and it therefore appears that the blood feud in Rome was suppressed very early on by the energetic appearance of the community power.

Likewise, nothing of the influence that the comrades and the circumstances have on the decision-making process according to the oldest German law can be perceived in the oldest Roman law, nor is there anything to be found in this one, which is so common in the former, that the will itself and power unite Representing the claim with weapons in hand is treated as necessary or permissible in court.

The legal proceedings are state or private proceedings, depending on whether the king intervenes on his own initiative or only after a call from the injured party. This only occurs when the common peace is broken, especially in the case of treason or association with the enemy of the country (proditio) and violent rebellion against the authorities (perduellio). But also the evil murderer (parricida), the molester of boys, the violator of the honor of a virgin or woman, the arsonist, the false witness, as well as whoever discusses the harvest through evil magic or who trespasses at night on the field left to the care of the gods and the people the grain cuts, they also break the common peace and are therefore respected as high traitors.

The king opens and presides over the trial and passes the verdict after he has discussed it with the councilors who have been brought in. However, after he has initiated the process, he is free to transfer the further proceedings and the decision-making to deputies,who are regularly removed from the council; The later extraordinary deputies, the two-men for the condemnation of rebellion (duoviri perduellionis) and the later permanent deputies, the “murder trackers” (quaestores parricidii), who were initially responsible for tracking down and arresting the murderers, i.e. a certain police activity, do not belong to the royal period but may well be linked to certain facilities of the same.

Pre-trial detention is the rule, but the defendant can also be released on bond. Torture to force confession only occurs for slaves. Anyone who is convicted of breaking the common peace always pays with his life; The death penalties are varied: the false witness is thrown from the castle rock, the crop thief is strung up, the arsonist is burned. The king cannot pardon, only the community can; But the king can allow or deny the condemned person access to the path of mercy (provocatio). In addition, the law also recognizes that the convicted criminal may be pardoned by the gods; Whoever kneels before the priest of Jupiter may not be struck with rods on the same day; whoever enters his house tied must be freed from the bonds; and life is given to the criminal who happens to meet one of the holy virgins of Vesta on his way to death.

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(1) This “chariot chair” – another explanation is not possible linguistically (cf. also Serv. Aen. 1, 16) – is probably most simply explained in the way that the king alone was authorized to drive in the city, from where the law later remained with the highest official for solemn occasions, and that originally, as long as there was no elevated tribunal, he administered justice from the chariot chair in the Comitium or wherever else he wanted.

(2) The story of the death of King Tatius, as given by Plutarch (Rom. 23, 24): that relatives of Tatius had murdered Laurentian ambassadors; that Tatius had denied justice to the complaining relatives of the slain; that Tatius was then killed by them; that Romulus acquitted the murderers of Tatius because murder was punished for murder; But that as a result of divine judgments passed on both cities at the same time, both the first and second murderers in Rome and in Laurentum subsequently received just punishment – this story looks entirely like a historicization of the abolition of blood revenge, similar to the introduction of provocation in the Horatier myth underlying. The versions of this story that appear elsewhere differ significantly, but also seem confused or edited.

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The king imposes fines on the state for administrative offenses and police offenses at his discretion; they consist of a certain number (hence the name multa) of cattle or sheep. It is also in his hand to recognize strokes of the rod.

In all other cases where only the individual and not the common peace was violated, the state only intervenes at the call of the injured party, who causes the opponent, if necessary with physical force, to face the king personally with him. If both parties have appeared and the plaintiff has presented the demand orally and the defendant has refused to fulfill it in the same way, the king can either investigate the matter or have it settled on his behalf by a representative. The regular form of atonement for such injustice was the comparison between the violator and the injured party; The state only stepped in if the person who caused the damage did not satisfy the injured (injury) party with sufficient atonement (poena), if someone was deprived of their property or if their just demand was not met.

It is impossible to determine what the person stolen from the thief was entitled to demand from the thief in this era and when the theft was considered capable of atonement. However, the injured man justifiably demanded more severe things from the thief who was caught in the act than from the one who was discovered later, since the bitterness that is to be atoned for is stronger against the thief than against the latter. If the theft of atonement appeared incapable or if the thief was unable to pay the estimate demanded by the victim and approved by the judge, the judge awarded him as a separate man to the victim.

In the case of damage (iniuria) to the body or property, in less serious cases the injured person must definitely atone; If, on the other hand, a limb was lost as a result, the mutilated person could demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Since the arable land was used by the Romans for a long time in a field community and was only divided relatively late in time, ownership did not develop in the real estate, but initially in the “slave and livestock class” (familia pecuniaque). The legal basis for this is not the right of the stronger, but rather all property is viewed as being allocated to the individual citizen by the community for exclusive ownership and use, which is why only the citizen and whom the community respects in this respect as the citizen is capable of doing so to have property.

All property passes freely from hand to hand; Roman law makes no essential distinction between movable and immovable property since the concept of private property was extended to the latter, and recognizes no unconditional right of children or other relatives to paternal or family property. However, the father is not able to arbitrarily deprive the children of their right to inheritance, since he can neither abolish paternal power nor make a will other than with the consent of the entire community, which could also be refused and was certainly often refused in such cases.

While he was still alive, the father could also make detrimental orders to the children; Because the law was economical in placing personal restrictions on the owner and, on the whole, allowed every adult man to freely dispose of his property. However, the arrangement according to which the person who sold his inheritance and robbed his children of it was placed under guardianship by the authorities like a madman may well go back to the time when arable land was first divided up and thus private wealth in general assumed greater importance the community received.

In this way, the two opposites, the owner’s unlimited right of disposal and the retention of the family property, were, as far as possible, united in Roman law. Real restrictions on property were absolutely not permitted, with the exception of the rights that were indispensable for agriculture. Hereditary leases and real property rents are legally impossible; Instead of pledging, which the law also knows little about, the immediate transfer of ownership of the pledge to the creditor serves, as it were, as the purchaser of the same, whereby he gives his trust word (fiducia) not to sell the thing until the claim has expired and to give it away Repayment of the amount advanced is to be returned to the debtor.

Contracts that the state concludes with a citizen, especially the obligation of the guarantors to provide a service to the state (praevides, praedes), are valid without any further formality. On the other hand, the contracts between private individuals generally do not provide any right to legal assistance from the state; The only thing that protects the creditor is the word of trust, which is upheld in the commercial manner, and, in the case of the oath that is often added, the fear of the gods who avenge perjury.

Only the betrothal is legally actionable, as a result of which the father, if he does not give the promised bride, has to pay atonement and compensation for it, as well as the purchase (mancipatio) and the loan (nexum). The purchase is considered legally completed when the seller places the purchased item in the buyer’s hands (mancipare) and at the same time the buyer pays the seller the agreed price in the presence of witnesses; What happened since copper became the regular measure of value instead of sheep and cattle was done by adding the required quantity of copper to the scales correctly kept by an impartial person (3).

Under these conditions, the seller must vouch for the fact that he is the owner and, moreover, both the seller and the buyer must fulfill any special agreement entered into; Otherwise, he will punish the other party in the same way as if he had stolen the thing from him. However, the purchase only results in a lawsuit if it was fulfilled step by step on both sides; Purchase on credit does not give or take ownership and does not give rise to a lawsuit. In a similar way, the loan is entered into by the creditor weighing the required quantity of copper to the debtor in front of witnesses under an obligation (nexum) to return it. In addition to the capital, the debtor also has to pay interest, which under normal circumstances was probably ten percent for the year (4).

The loan was repaid in the same way. If a debtor did not fulfill his obligation to the state, he was immediately sold with everything he had; that the state demanded was sufficient to establish guilt. If, on the other hand, a private person reported the rape of his property to the king (vindiciae) or the loan he received was not repaid, it depended on whether the facts of the case needed to be established, which was regularly the case in property lawsuits, or whether they were already clear , which could easily be accomplished using witnesses in loan lawsuits according to the applicable legal standards. The determination of the facts took place in the form of a bet, with each party making a stake (sacramentum) in the event of defeat: for important items worth more than ten cattle, one of five cattle, for smaller items, one of five sheep.

The judge then decided who had bet correctly,whereupon the use of the losing party fell to the priests for the public sacrifices. Whoever bet wrongly and let thirty days pass without satisfying his opponent; Furthermore, whose obligation to perform was clear from the start, i.e. usually the loan debtor, unless he had witnesses for the repayment, was subject to the execution procedure “by hand” (manus iniectio), in which the plaintiff grabbed him where he found him and brought him to court simply to fulfill the acknowledged debt.

The captured person was not allowed to defend himself; A third party could appear on his behalf and describe this act of violence as unauthorized (vindex), whereupon the proceedings were then discontinued; This representation alone made the representative personally responsible, which is why the proletarian could not be a representative for the tax-paying citizen. If neither fulfillment nor representation occurred, the king gave the captured person to the creditor in such a way that the creditor could take him away and keep him like a slave.

If sixty days had then passed, during which the debtor had been exhibited three times in the market and a call had been made to ask whether anyone would have mercy on him, and all this had been unsuccessful, the creditors had the right to kill him and take possession of his corpse share, or to sell him with his children and his belongings as slaves abroad, or to keep him as slaves instead of him; Of course, as long as he remained within the circle of the Roman community, he could not become a complete slave according to Roman law.

In this way, the Roman community protected everyone’s belongings and assets with relentless severity against the thief and damaging agent, as well as against the unauthorized owner and the insolvent debtor.If, during this time, the debtor was exhibited three times in the market and asked whether anyone would have mercy on him, and all this was unsuccessful, the creditors had the right to kill him and divide his corpse, or take him with them to sell his children and his belongings as slaves abroad, or to keep him as slaves instead of him; Of course, as long as he remained within the circle of the Roman community, he could not become a complete slave according to Roman law.

In this way, the Roman community protected everyone’s belongings and assets with relentless severity against the thief and damaging agent, as well as against the unauthorized owner and the insolvent debtor.If, during this time, the debtor was exhibited three times in the market and asked whether anyone would have mercy on him, and all this was unsuccessful, the creditors had the right to kill him and divide his corpse, or take him with them to sell his children and his belongings abroad as slaves, or to keep him as slaves instead of him; Of course, as long as he remained within the circle of the Roman community, he could not become a complete slave according to Roman law. In this way, the Roman community protected everyone’s belongings and property against the thief and damaging agent as well as against the unauthorized owner and the insolvent debtor with relentless severity.

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(3) Mancipation in its developed form is necessarily younger than the Servian reform, as the selection of mancipable objects aimed at establishing peasant property proves, and as even tradition must have assumed, since it makes Servius the inventor of the scales. However, in terms of its origins, mancipation must be much older, because it initially only applies to objects that are acquired by grasping them with the hand and must therefore, in its oldest form, belong to the era where wealth was essentially in slaves and livestock (familia pecuniaque). duration. The enumeration of those objects that had to be mancipated will therefore be a Servian innovation; Mancipation itself and therefore also the use of scales and copper are older. Without a doubt, mancipation was originally a general form of purchase and still appeared in all things after the Servian reform; Only later misunderstanding interpreted the rule that certain things had to be mancipated to mean that only these things and no others could be mancipated.

(4) Namely for the ten-monthly year the twelfth part of the capital (uncia), so for the ten-monthly year 8 1/3, for the twelve-monthly year ten percent.

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In the same way, the property of those who were unable to defend themselves, and therefore also not able to protect their own assets, the immature and the insane, and especially that of women, was protected by appointing the next heirs to take care of it.

After death, the property passes to the next heirs, whereby all equals, including women, receive equal shares and the widow and children are allowed to share a headboard. Only the people’s assembly can dispense from legal succession, although the priest’s opinion must be obtained beforehand because of the sacred duties attached to the inheritance; However, such dispensations seem to have become very common in the early days, and where they were missing, given the completely free disposition that everyone was entitled to over their assets during their lifetime, this deficiency could be remedied to some extent by transferring their entire assets to a friend who distributed the same after death according to the will of the deceased.

The release was unknown to the oldest law. The owner could of course refrain from exercising his property rights; But the impossibility of mutual binding between the master and the slave was not abolished by this, much less the right of hospitality or even citizenship was acquired for the latter of the community. The release can therefore initially only have been a fact, not a law, and it could never have prevented the master from treating the freedman as a slave again if he liked.

However, this was deviated from in cases where the master had committed himself not only to the slave, but to the community, to leave the slave in possession of freedom. However, there was no separate legal form for such a binding of the Lord – the best proof that there could not have been a release at the beginning – but the channels that the law otherwise offered were used: the will, the process, the Estimate.

If the master had either acquitted the slave when making his last will in the people’s assembly or if he had allowed the slave to appeal to him about his freedom in court or to have his name entered in the treasure list, then the freedman was not considered a citizen, but probably as free even towards the former master and his heirs and therefore initially as a protective relative, later as a plebeian. That of the son encountered greater difficulties than the release of the servant; for if the relationship between the master and the servant is accidental and therefore arbitrarily solvable, the father can never cease to be a father. That is why later the son, in order to free himself from the father, first had to enter into slavery and then be released from it; In the present period, however, emancipation may not have occurred at all.

Citizens and their relatives lived in Rome according to this law, between whom, as far as we can see, complete equality under private law existed from the beginning. The stranger, on the other hand, unless he has surrendered to a Roman patron and therefore lives as a protective relative, has no rights, he and his belongings. What the Roman citizen takes from him is just as rightly acquired as the abandoned shell picked up on the seashore; However, the Roman citizen can actually gain the property that lies outside the Roman border, but cannot be considered its owner in the legal sense; Because the individual citizen is not authorized to advance the boundaries of the community. It is different in war; What the soldier who fights under the army gains, movable as well as immovable property, does not accrue to him, but to the state, and here it also depends on the state to advance or withdraw the border.

Exceptions to these general rules arise through special international treaties that secure certain rights for members of foreign communities within the Roman community. Above all, the eternal alliance between Rome and Latium declared all contracts between Romans and Latins to be legally valid and at the same time prescribed an accelerated civil trial for them before sworn “recipients” (reciperatores), who, as they were, contrary to the other Roman usage, gave the decision to a single judge transferred, always in the majority and in odd numbers, can probably be thought of as a commercial and measurement court composed of judges from both nations and a chairman.

They judge at the place where the contract was concluded and must have completed the process within ten days at the latest. The forms in which communication between Romans and Latins took place were, of course, the general ones in which patricians and plebeians also interacted with each other; for the mancipation and the nexum were originally not formal acts at all, but the concise expression of the legal concepts, whose rule extended at least as far as Latin was spoken.

Communication with actual foreign countries was mediated in other ways and in other forms. Already in early times, treaties regarding trade and legal succession must have been concluded with the Caerites and other friendly peoples and these must have become the basis of international private law (ius gentium), which gradually developed in Rome alongside land law.

A trace of this legal formation is the curious mutuum, the “change” (from mutare; like dividuus); a form of loan which, like the nexum, is not based on a binding declaration by the debtor made expressly in front of witnesses, but on the mere transfer of the money from one hand to the other and which obviously arose from dealings with foreigners as the nexum did from the local one business transactions. It is therefore characteristic that the word recurs as μοίτον in Sicilian Greek; with which is to be connected the reappearance of the Latin carcer in the Sicilian κάρκαρον.

Since it is linguistically certain that both words are originally Latin, their occurrence in the local Sicilian dialect becomes an important testimony to the frequent traffic of Latin boatmen on the island, which led them to borrow money there and the imprisonment that was everywhere to submit to the elder rights as a result of the unpaid loan. Conversely, the name of the Syracuse prison, “Quarries” or λατομίαι, was transferred in ancient times to the expanded Roman state prison, the lautumiae.

Let’s take a look back at the entirety of these institutions, which are essentially taken from the oldest record of Roman customary law, made about half a century after the abolition of the monarchy, and whose existence already in the royal period is probably true for individual points, but not in the If the whole thing is doubtful, we recognize in it the right of a well-advanced agricultural and shopping town that is as liberal as it is consistent.

Here, the conventional imagery, such as that shown in German legal statutes, has already completely disappeared. There is no doubt that this must have happened to the Italians at some point; Remarkable evidence of this is, for example, the form of the house search, whereby, according to Roman and German custom, the searcher had to appear without an outer garment in just a shirt, and above all the ancient Latin formula for declaring war, in which two forms occur, at least also among the Celts and the Germans Symbols are encountered: the “pure herb” (herba pura, Franconian chrene chruda) as a symbol of the native soil and the singed bloody staff as a sign of the beginning of war.

With a few exceptions, however, in which religious considerations protected the ancient customs – this includes, in addition to the declaration of war by the Fetal College, the Confarreation – the Roman law that we know completely and fundamentally rejects the symbol and in all cases does not demand anything more nothing less than the full and pure expression of the will. The handover of the thing, the request to testify, the initiation of the marriage are completed just as the parties have declared the intention in an understandable manner; It is indeed customary to hand the matter into the hands of the new owner, to tug on the ears of those invited to testify, to cover the bride’s head and to introduce her into the husband’s house in a ceremonial procession; But all these ancient practices are already legally worthless customs according to the oldest Roman land law.

Completely analogous to how all allegory and thus all personification was eliminated from religion, all symbolism was fundamentally expelled from law. Likewise, the oldest state that the Hellenic and Germanic institutions represent to us, where the community power still struggles with the authority of the smaller family or district cooperatives that have been absorbed into the community, has been completely eliminated here; There is no legal alliance within the state to supplement the imperfect state aid with mutual protection and defence, no serious trace of blood feud or of family property restricting the disposal of the individual.

Something similar must have once existed among the Italians; it may be in individual institutions of sacred law, for example in the Suehnbock, which the involuntary manslaughterer was obliged to give to the closest relatives of the killed person, a trace of which can be found; For the oldest period of Rome that we can think of, this is a point of view that has long since been overcome. Although the race was destroyed, the family was not destroyed in the Roman community; But the ideal and real omnipotence of the state in the state territory is no more limited by it than by the freedom that the state grants and guarantees to the citizen.

The ultimate legal basis everywhere is the state: freedom is just another expression for civil law in the broadest sense; all property is based on express or tacit transfer from the community to the individual; The contract is only valid if the community testifies to it in its representatives, the will is only valid if the community confirms it. The areas of public and private law are sharply and clearly separated from each other: offenses against the state, which immediately call for the court of the state and always result in a life sentence; the offenses against the fellow citizen or the guest, which are initially settled through settlement through atonement or satisfaction of the injured party and are never punished with life, but at most with the loss of freedom.

The greatest liberality in allowing traffic and the strictest execution procedure go hand in hand; just as today in trading states the general ability to change and the strict process of exchange occurred together. The citizen and the protector are completely equal in their dealings; State treaties also allow guests to have comprehensive legal equality; women are completely on a par with men in their legal capacity, although they are limited in their actions; Yes, the boy who has barely grown up immediately receives the most comprehensive right to dispose of his assets, and whoever can dispose of it at all is as sovereign in his circle as the state is in the public domain.

The credit system is extremely characteristic: a land loan does not exist, but instead of the mortgage debt, what occurs immediately, which today concludes the mortgage process, is the transfer of property from the debtor to the creditor; On the other hand, personal credit is guaranteed in the most comprehensive, not to say most extravagant, way, in that the legislature authorizes the creditor to treat the insolvent debtor in the same way as the thief and to do to him in full what Shylock half-ridiculed his mortal enemy to do admits the seriousness of the law, and even encloses the point about over-compliance more carefully than the Jew did.

The law could not have made it clearer that at the same time it was necessary to establish independent, not indebted peasants and commercial credit,but I intend to suppress all pseudo-ownership and all wordlessness with relentless energy. If one takes into account the early recognized right of settlement of all Latins and the validity of civil marriage, which was also early declared, one will see that this state, which demanded the highest of its citizens and increased the concept of the subservience of the individual to the whole, like no other before according to him, only did this and could only do this because he threw down the barriers of traffic itself and unleashed freedom just as much as he restricted it.

The law always appears unconditionally, permitting or inhibiting: like the unrepresented stranger to the hunted game, the guest is equal to the citizen; The contract usually does not give rise to any complaint, but where the creditor’s right is recognized, it is so omnipotent that the poor person is nowhere given any salvation, nowhere is there any humane and fair consideration; It is as if law takes pleasure in bringing out the sharpest points everywhere, in drawing the most extreme consequences, in forcefully imposing the tyrannical nature of the legal concept on the stupidest understanding.

The poetic form, the comfortable clarity that prevail gracefully in the Germanic legal systems, are alien to the Roman; in his law everything is clear and concise, no symbol is used, no institution is too many.

It’s not cruel; everything that is necessary is carried out without any circumstances, including the death penalty; The fact that the free cannot be tortured is a fundamental principle of Roman law that other peoples have had to struggle to win for thousands of years. But it is terrible, this law with its inexorable severity, which one cannot imagine being tempered too much by humane practice, because it is popular law – more terrible than the lead roofs and the torture chambers, that series of living burials of the poor in the debt towers saw the gaping gap of the wealthy.

But the greatness of Rome is determined and founded on this very fact that the people set for themselves a right and endured a right in which the eternal principles of freedom and authority, property and legal succession prevailed unadulterated and unmitigated and still prevail today.then the guest is equal to the citizen; The contract usually does not give rise to any complaint, but where the creditor’s right is recognized, it is so omnipotent that the poor person is nowhere given any salvation, nowhere is there any humane and fair consideration; It is as if law takes pleasure in bringing out the sharpest points everywhere, in drawing the most extreme consequences, in forcefully imposing the tyrannical nature of the legal concept on the stupidest understanding.

The poetic form, the comfortable clarity that prevail gracefully in the Germanic legal systems, are alien to the Roman; in his law everything is clear and concise, no symbol is used, no institution is too many. It’s not cruel; everything that is necessary is carried out without any circumstances, including the death penalty; The fact that the free cannot be tortured is a fundamental principle of Roman law that other peoples have had to struggle to win for thousands of years. But it is terrible, this law with its inexorable severity, which one cannot imagine being tempered too much by humane practice, because it is popular law – more terrible than the lead roofs and the torture chambers, that series of living burials of the poor in the debt towers saw the gaping gap of the wealthy.

But the greatness of Rome is determined and founded on this very fact that the people set for themselves a right and endured a right in which the eternal principles of freedom and authority, property and legal succession prevailed unadulterated and unmitigated and still prevail today.then the guest is equal to the citizen; The contract usually does not give rise to any complaint, but where the creditor’s right is recognized, it is so omnipotent that the poor person is nowhere given any salvation, nowhere is there any humane and fair consideration; It is as if law takes pleasure in bringing out the sharpest points everywhere, in drawing the most extreme consequences, in forcefully imposing the tyrannical nature of the legal concept on the stupidest understanding.

The poetic form, the comfortable clarity that prevail gracefully in the Germanic legal systems, are alien to the Roman; in his law everything is clear and concise, no symbol is used, no institution is too many. It’s not cruel; everything that is necessary is carried out without any circumstances, including the death penalty; The fact that the free cannot be tortured is a fundamental principle of Roman law that other peoples have had to struggle to win for thousands of years. But it is terrible, this law with its inexorable severity, which one cannot imagine being tempered too much by humane practice, because it is popular law – more terrible than the lead roofs and the torture chambers, that series of living burials of the poor in the debt towers saw the gaping gap of the wealthy.

But the greatness of Rome is determined and founded on this very fact that the people set for themselves a right and endured a right in which the eternal principles of freedom and authority, property and legal succession prevailed unadulterated and unmitigated and still prevail today.in which the eternal principles of freedom and authority, property and legal succession reigned unadulterated and unmitigated and still reign today.in which the eternal principles of freedom and authority, property and legal succession reigned unadulterated and unmitigated and still reign today.