inveterate grievance of the city, had been discouraged by the Twelve Tables, and abolished by the clamors of the people.  It was revived by their wants and idleness, tolerated by the discretion of the praetors, and finally determined by the Code of Justinian.  Persons of illustrious rank were confined to the moderate profit of 4 per cent. 6 was pronounced to be the ordinary and legal standard of interest; 8 was allowed for the convenience of manufacturers and merchants; 12 was granted to nautical insurance, which the wiser ancients had not attempted to define; but, except in this perilous adventure, the practice of exorbitant usury was severely restrained.[33] The most simple interest was condemned by the clergy of the East and West; but the sense of mutual benefit, which had triumphed over the laws of the republic, had resisted with equal firmness the decrees of the Church, and even the prejudices of mankind.[34]

3.  Nature and society impose the strict obligation of repairing an injury; and the sufferer by private injustice acquires a personal right and a legitimate action.  If the property of another be intrusted to our care, the requisite degree of care may rise and fall according to the benefit which we derive from such temporary possession; we are seldom made responsible for inevitable accident, but the consequences of a voluntary fault must always be imputed to the author.  A Roman pursued and recovered his stolen goods by a civil action of theft; they might pass through a succession of pure and innocent hands, but nothing less than a prescription of thirty years could extinguish his original claim.  They were restored by the sentence of the praetor, and the injury was compensated by double, or threefold, or even quadruple damages, as the deed had been perpetrated by secret fraud or open rapine, as the robber had been surprised in the fact or detected by a subsequent research.  The Aquilian law defended the living property of a citizen, his slaves and cattle, from the stroke of malice or negligence:  the highest price was allowed that could be ascribed to the domestic animal at any moment of the year preceding his death; a similar latitude of thirty days was granted on the destruction of any other valuable effects.  A personal injury is blunted or sharpened by the manners of the times and the sensibility of the individual:  the pain or the disgrace of a word or blow cannot easily be appreciated by a pecuniary equivalent.

The rude jurisprudence of the decemvirs had confounded all hasty insults, which did not amount to the fracture of a limb by condemning the aggressor to the common penalty of twenty-five asses.  But the same denomination of money was reduced in three centuries from a pound to the weight of half an ounce:  and the insolence of a wealthy Roman indulged himself in the cheap amusement of breaking and satisfying the law of the Twelve Tables.  Veratius ran through the streets striking on the face the inoffensive