Page:Ancient Law.djvu/343

330 asks the question, who is primarily alluded to. But the serviceableness of the stipulation is most vividly illustrated by referring to the actual examples in the pages of the Latin comic dramatists. If the entire scenes are read down in which these passages occur (ex. gra. Plautus, Pseudolus, Act I. sc. 1; Act IV. sc. 6; Trinummus, Act V. sc. 2), it will be perceived how effectually the attention of the person meditating the promise must have been arrested by the question, and how ample was the opportunity for withdrawal from an improvident undertaking.

In the Literal or Written Contract, the formal act, by which an Obligation was superinduced on the Convention, was an entry of the sum due, where it could be specifically ascertained, on the debit side of a ledger. The explanation of this Contract turns on a point or Roman domestic manners, the systematic character and exceeding regularity of book-keeping in ancient times. There are several minor difficulties of old Roman law, as, for example, the nature of the Slave's Peculium, which are only cleared up when we recollect that a Roman household consisted or a number of persons strictly accountable to its head, and that every single item of domestic receipt and expenditure, after being entered in waste books, was transferred at stated periods to a general household ledger. There are some obscurities, however, in the descriptions we have received of the Literal Contract, the