The History of Rome, Book I eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 382 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book I.

The History of Rome, Book I eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 382 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book I.
be rendered by all in concert to any community assailed, and whatever is won in joint warfare shall be equally distributed.”  The stipulated equality of rights in trade and exchange, in commercial credit and in inheritance, tended, by the manifold relations of business intercourse to which it led, still further to interweave the interests of communities already connected by the ties of similar language and manners, and in this way produced an effect somewhat similar to that of the abolition of customs-restrictions in our own day.  Each community certainly retained in form its own law:  down to the time of the Social war Latin law was not necessarily identical with Roman:  we find, for example, that the enforcing of betrothal by action at law, which was abolished at an early period in Rome, continued to subsist in the Latin communities.  But the simple and purely national development of Latin law, and the endeavour to maintain as far as possible uniformity of rights, led at length to the result, that the law of private relations was in matter and form substantially the same throughout all Latium.  This uniformity of rights comes most distinctly into view in the rules laid down regarding the loss and recovery of freedom on the part of the individual burgess.  According to an ancient and venerable maxim of law among the Latin stock no burgess could become a slave in the state wherein he had been free, or suffer the loss of his burgess-rights while he remained within it:  if he was to be punished with the loss of freedom and of burgess-rights (which was the same thing), it was necessary that he should be expelled from the state and should enter on the condition of slavery among strangers.  This maxim of law was now extended to the whole territory of the league; no member of any of the federal states might live as a slave within the bounds of the league.  Applications of this principle are seen in the enactment embodied in the Twelve Tables, that the insolvent debtor, in the event of his creditor wishing to sell him, must be sold beyond the boundary of the Tiber, in other words, beyond the territory of the league; and in the clause of the second treaty between Rome and Carthage, that an ally of Rome who might be taken prisoner by the Carthaginians should be free so soon as he entered a Roman seaport.  Although there did not probably subsist a general intercommunion of marriage within the league, yet, as has been already remarked(8) intermarriage between the different communities frequently occurred.  Each Latin could primarily exercise political rights only where he was enrolled as a burgess; but on the other hand it was implied in an equality of private rights, that any Latin could take up his abode in any place within the Latin bounds; or, to use the phraseology of the present day, there existed, side by side with the special burgess-rights of the individual communities, a general right of settlement co-extensive with the confederacy; and, after the plebeian was
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The History of Rome, Book I from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.