Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/130

110 tions of commercial intercourse to which it led, still further to interweave the interests of communities already connected by the ties of similar language and manners, and, in this way produced an effect somewhat similar to that of the abolition of customs-restrictions in our own day. Each community certainly retained, in form, its own law: down to the time of the federal war Latin law was not necessarily identical with Roman: we find, for example, that the enforcing of betrothal by action at law, which was as abolished at an early period in Rome, continued to subsist in the Latin communities. But the simple and purely national development of Latin law, and the endeavour to maintain as far as possible uniformity of rights, led at length to the result, that the law of private relations was in matter and form substantially the same throughout all Latium. This uniformity of rights comes very distinctly into view in the principle laid down regarding the loss and recovery of freedom on the part of the individual burgess. According to an ancient and venerable maxim of law among the Latin stock no burgess could become a slave in the state wherein he had been free, or suffer the loss of his burgess-rights while he remained within it: if he was to be punished with the loss of freedom and of burgess-rights (which was the same thing), it was necessary that he should be expelled from the state, and should enter on the condition of slavery among strangers. This maxim of law was now extended to the whole territory of the league; no member of any of the federal states might live as a slave within the bounds of the league. Applications of this principle are seen in the enactment embodied in the Twelve Tables, that the insolvent debtor, in the event of his creditor washing to sell him, must be sold beyond the boundary of the Tiber, in other words, beyond the territory of the league; and in the clause of the second treaty between Rome and Carthage, that an ally of Rome who might be taken prisoner by the Carthaginians should be free so soon as he entered a Roman seaport. It has already (P. 42) been indicated as probable that the covenanted uniformity of rights also included intercommunion of marriage, and that every full burgess of a Latin community could conclude a legitimate marriage with any Latin woman of equal standing. Each Latin could of course only exercise political rights where he was enrolled as a burgess; but, on the other hand, it was implied in an equality of private rights, that any Latin