Page:The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes.djvu/29

12 other kindred doctrines of early Roman law. There is a defective passage in Gaius, which seems to say that liability may sometimes be escaped by giving up even the dead body of the offender. So Livy relates that, Brutulus Papius having caused a breach of truce with the Romans, the Samnites determined to surrender him, and that, upon his avoiding disgrace and punishment by suicide, they sent his lifeless body. It is noticeable that the surrender seems to be regarded its the natural expiation for the breach of treaty, and that it is equally a matter of course to send the body when the wrong-doer has perished.

The most curious examples of this sort occur in the region of what we should now call contract. Livy again furnishes an example, if, indeed, the last is not one. The Roman Consul Postumius concluded the disgraceful peace of the Caudine Forks (per sponsionem, as Livy says, denying the common story that it was per fœdus), and he was sent to Rome to obtain the sanction of the people. When there however, he proposed that the persons who had made the