SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Although modern translations do their best to make it all sound fairly lucid, the original Latin wording is often far from that. In particular, the absence of nouns and differentiated pronouns can make it almost impossible to know who is doing what to whom. ‘If he summons to law, he is to go. If he does not go, he is to call to witness, then is to seize him’ presumably means, as it is usually translated, ‘If a plaintiff summons a defendant to law, the defendant is to go. If he does not go, the plaintiff is to call someone else to witness, then is to seize the defendant.’ But it does not exactly say that. All the signs are that whoever drafted this and many other clauses was still struggling to use written language to frame precise regulations, and that the conventions of logical argument and rational expression were very much in their infancy. Yet the mere attempt to create a formal record of this sort was an important stage in what is now often called state formation. One of the key turning points in many early societies is the rudimentary, usually very partial, codification of law.