Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/176

 160 fflSTORY OF GREECE. the limits sufficient for payment: this was one of the points which Niebuhi had denied. Such was the old law of Rome, with respect to the consequences of an action for money had and received, for more than a century after the Twelve Tables. But the law did not apply this stringent personal execution to any debt except that arising from loan, and even in that debt only to the princi- pal money, not to the interest, which latter had to be claimed by a process both more gentle and less efficient, applying to the property only and not to the person of the debtor. Accordingly, it was to the advantage of the creditor to devise some means for bringing his claim of interest under the same stringent process as his claim for the principal ; it was also to his advantage, if his claim arose, not out of money lent, but out of sale, compensation for injury, or any other source, to give it the form of an action for money lent. Now the nexum, or nexi obligatio, was an artifice a fictitious loan whereby this purpose was accomplished. The severe process which legally belonged only to the recovery of the principal money, was extended by the nexum so as to comprehend the interest ; and so as to comprehend, also, claims for money arising from all other sources (as well as from loan), wherein the law gave no direct recourse except against the property of a debtor. The debitor nexus was made liable by this legal artifice to pasa into the condition of an addictus, either without having borrowed money at all, or for the interest as well as for the principal of that which he had borrowed. The Lex Poetelia, passed about B. c. 325, liberated all the nexi then uiidei liability, and interdicted the nexi obligatio forever afterwards ( Cicero. De Republ. ii. 34; Livy, viii, 28). Here, as in the seisachthcia of Solon, the existing contracts were cancelled, at the same time that the whole class of similar contracts were forbidden for the future. But though the nexi obligatio was thus abolished, the old stringent rem edy still continued against the debtor on loan, as far as the principal sum liorrowed, apart from interest Some mitigations were introduced : by a Lex Julia, the still more important provision was added, that the debtor by means of a cessio bonorum might save his person from seizure. But this cessio bonorum was coupled with conditions which could not always be fulfilled, nor was the debtor admitted to the benefit of it, if he had been guilty of carelessness or dishonesty. Accordingly, the old stringent process, and the addiction in which it ended, though it became less frequent, still continued throughout the course of Imperial Rome, and even down to the time of Justinian. The private prison, with adjudicated debtors working in it. was still the appendage to a Roman money-lender's house, even in the third and fourth centuries after the Christian era. though the practice seems to have become rarer and rarer. The status of the addictus debitor, with its peculiar rights and obligations, is discussed by Quintilian (vii, .?) ; and Anl-js Gellius observes: " Addici namque nunc et vinciri multos videmus, ciuia viu- culorum pcenam detcrrimi homines contemnunt," (xx, 1.) If the addictus ddntor was adjudged to several creditors, tliC3 r were ullowcd by the Twelve Tables to divide his body among them No cxiunple