Book 6
10
As ususcapio is treated as a compound word, in which the letter a is pronounced long, just so pignoriscapio was pronounced as one word with a long a. These are the words of Cato in the first book of his Epistolary Questions: p. cviii., Jordan. It should be Varro rather than Cato. Pignoriscapio, resorted to because of military pay That is, pay in arrears. which a soldier ought to receive from the public paymaster, is a word by itself. Ususcapio or usucapio is a taking, or claim to possession, by right of actual tenure (usus); pignoriscapio is a seizure of goods. On the latter see Mommsen, Staatsrecht, i.3, p. 160, and cf. Suet. Jul. xvii. 2. The a is not long in either word, but has the accent, which may be what Gellius means. From this it is perfectly clear that one may say capio as if it were captio, in connection with both usus and pignus.
11
That neither levitas nor nequitia has the meaning that is given to those words in ordinary conversation.
11
I OBSERVE that levitas is now generally used to denote inconsistency and changeableness, and nequitia, in the sense of craftiness and cunning. But those of the men of early days who spoke properly and purely applied the term leves to those whom we now commonly call worthless and meriting no esteem. That is, they used levitas with precisely the force of vilitas, and applied the term nequam to a man of no importance nor worth, the sort of man that the Greeks usually call a)/swtos (beyond recovery) or a)ko/lastos(incorrigible).
