177), "a sum was placed on the life of every free man, according to
his rank, and a corresponding sum on every wound that could be
inflicted on his person, for nearly every injury that could be done to
his civil rights, honour or peace; the sum being aggravated according
to adventitious circumstances." These compositions are evidently
regarded as a valuable source of income; highly complex rules regulate
the title to them and the responsibility for them; and, as I have
already had occasion to state, they often follow a very peculiar line
of devolution, if they have not been acquitted at the decease of the
person to whom they belong. If therefore the criterion of a _delict_,
_wrong_, or _tort_ be that the person who suffers it, and not the
State, is conceived to be wronged, it may be asserted that in the
infancy of jurisprudence the citizen depends for protection against
violence or fraud not on the Law of Crime but on the Law of Tort.
Torts then are copiously enlarged upon in primitive jurisprudence. It
must be added that Sins are known to it also. Of the Teutonic codes it
is almost unnecessary to make this assertion, because those codes, in
the form in which we have received them, were compiled or recast by
Christian legislators. But it is also true that non-Christian bodies
of archaic law entail penal consequences on certain classes of acts
and on certain classes of omissions, as being violations of divine
prescriptions and commands. The law administered at Athens by the
Senate of Areopagus was probably a special religious code, and at
Rome, apparently from a very early period, the Pontifical
jurisprudence punished adultery, sacrilege and perhaps murder. There
were therefore in the Athenian and in the Roman States laws punishing
_sins_. There were also laws punishing _torts_. The conception of
offence against God produced the first class of ordinances; the
conception of offence against one's neighbour produced the second; but
the idea of offence against the State or aggregate community did not
at first produce a true criminal jurisprudence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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