Kitap 20
10
I followed the advice of this teacher, when he referred me to another from whom I could learn what he ought to have taught me himself: And I thought that I ought to include in these notes of mine what I have learned from jurists and their writings, since those who are living in the midst of affairs and among men ought not to be ignorant of the commoner legal expressions. Manum conserere, to lay on hands. . . . For with one's opponent to lay hold of and claim in the prescribed formula anything about which there is a dispute, whether it be a field or something else, is called vindicia, or a claim. A seizing with the hand of the thing or place in question took place in the presence of the praetor according to the Twelve Tables, in which it was written vi. 5. "If any lay on hands in the presence of the magistrate." Cf. xx. i. 48; see Allen, Remnants of Early Latin, p. 85. But when the boundaries of Italy were extended and the praetors were greatly occupied with legal business, they found it hard to go to distant places to settle claims. Therefore it became usual by silent consent, though contrary to the Twelve Tables, for the litigants not to lay on hands in court in the presence of the praetor, but to call for a laying on of hands according to law; that is, that the one litigant should summon the other to the object in question, to lay hands on it according to law, and that they should go together to the field under dispute and bring some earth from it to the city to the praetor's court, for example one clod, and should lay claim to that clod, as if it were the whole field. Accordingly Ennius, wishing to describe such action, said that restitution was demanded, not by legal processes, such as are carried on before a praetor, nor by a laying on of hands according to law, but by war and the sword, and by genuine and resistless violence; and he seems to have expressed this by comparing that civil and symbolic festuca, a stalk or stem, was used of the rod with which slaves were touched in the ceremony of manumission. Here festucariam (a a(/pac lego/menon) is extended in meaning to include any symbolic legal process. power which is exercised in name only and not actually, with warlike and sanguinary violence.
