Chap. XI.]
LAW AND JUSTICE.
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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 to their 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 λατομίαι, was transferred at an early period to the enlarged Roman state-prison, the lautumiæ.
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 at least two symbols occurring 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 conduced to the protection of the ancient usages (a class to which the confarreatio belonged as well as the declaration of war by the college of Fetiales), 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 object into the hand of the new owner, to pull the person summoned to bear 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
