Roman Public Life (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The limitation by which a series of civil rights is destroyed is spoken of as a " lessening of caput" (capitis deminutio). It is in every case an infringement of rights already possessed by the individual. Now the loss of public rights could only follow on a loss of citizenship; but this is not the diminution but the annihilation of caput, and could not therefore in the earliest stage of Roman law (when there was no status recognised but that of citizenship) be called a capitis deminutio. The term must have been wholly confined to a loss of private rights, i.e. to the loss of the rights conveyed by the control of a familia.1 Thus the adrogatus suffers a lessening of caput by passing into the power of another. But a change from a higher to a lower status (even when the higher did not imply active rights) may at an early period have been regarded as an infringement of capul. We know, for instance, that the datio in mancipium of a son of a family was thought (at what period is uncertain) to involve it, because the child passes from a better to a worse station, although in his former condition he had no active rights of his own. It is stranger still that, certainly at an early period, the fact of a woman's passing into her husband's power (conventio in ma/mum) was held to have this consequence. It is one that is scarcely intelligible in the case of a filia familias who passes from one potestas to another; but in the case of a woman only under the burden, lighter and ever tending to be more relaxed, of the tutela of her relatives, it is a natural though not strictly legal conception.2 Some other applications of the system are still more artificial, and are perhaps creations of late Roman jurists who came to consider that the essence of a loss of caput was a change of status flatus comm...