# Useful Links to Roman Law Materials. 2.1.27-29

Roman Law and Society, Useful Links to Roman Law Materials., Ancient Law, lines 2.1.27-2.1.29. Latin.

Canonical: https://interlinea.aeterna-institute.org/library/latin/roman-law-and-society/useful-links-to-roman-law-materials/2.1.27

Even in the Homeric poems, we can see that these ideas are transient. Parities of circumstance were probably commoner in the simple mechanism of ancient society than they are now, and in the succession of similar cases awards are likely to follow and resemble each other. Here we have the germ or rudiment of a Custom, a conception posterior to that of Themistes or judgments. However strongly we, with our modern associations, may be inclined to lay down a priori that the notion of a Custom must precede that of a judicial sentence, and that a judgment must affirm a Custom or punish its breach, it seems quite certain that the historical order of the ideas is that in which I have placed them. The Homeric word for a custom in the embryo is sometimes "Themis" in the singular-more often "Dike," the meaning of which visibly fluctuates between a "judgment" and a "custom" or "usage." Nomos, a Law, so great and famous a term in the political vocabulary of the later Greek society, does not occur in Homer.
This notion of a divine agency, suggesting the Themistes, and itself impersonated in Themis, must be kept apart from other primitive beliefs with which a superficial inquirer might confound it. The conception of the Deity dictating an entire code or body of law, as in the case of the Hindoo laws of Menu, seems to belong to a range of ideas more recent and more advanced. "Themis" and "Themistes" are much less remotely linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the human mind, of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief meet us on all sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep together all the cardinal institutions of those times, the State, the Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations which those institutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically common rites and to offer common sacrifices; and every now and then the same duty is even more significantly recognized in the purifications and expiations which they perform, and which appear intended to deprecate punishment for involuntary or neglectful disrespect. Everybody acquainted with ordinary classical literature will remember the sacra gentilicia, which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in which some of the most curious features of primitive society are stereotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of succession hinge on the due solemnization of fixed ceremonies at the dead man's funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occur in the continuity of the family.

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Roman Law and Society, Useful Links to Roman Law Materials.. Text: The Latin Library (thelatinlibrary.com), used with permission. Changes: HTML markup removed and the text divided into reading sections by Interlinea.
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