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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
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Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates

THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

I. The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson


The History of Old Rome

CHAPTER XI - Law and Justice

ELPENOR EDITIONS IN PRINT

The Original Greek New Testament

» Contents of this Chapter

Page 19

Dealings with countries strictly foreign were carried on in a different fashion and by means of other forms. In very early times treaties as to commerce and legal redress must have been entered into with the Caerites and other friendly peoples, and must have formed the basis of the international private law (-ius gentium-), which gradually became developed in Rome alongside of the law of the land.

An indication of the formation of such a law is found in the remarkable -mutuum-, "the exchange" (from -mutare- like -dividuus-)--a form of loan, which was not based like the -nexum- upon a binding declaration of the debtor expressly emitted before witnesses, but upon the mere transit of the money from one hand to another, and which as evidently originated in dealings with foreigners as the -nexum- in business dealings at home. It is accordingly a significant fact that the word reappears in Sicilian Greek as --moiton--; and with this is to be connected the reappearance of 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 λατομίαι, was transferred at an early period to the enlarged Roman state-prison, the -lautumiae-.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/1-11-law-justice.asp?pg=19