The detachment of law from force was slow, and traces of the latter remained in every part of the former. In the heroic republic there were at first no laws providing for the punishment of offences and the restitution of private injuries; hence, failing judiciary laws, arose the need of duels and reprisals, which perpetuated the customs of the age of innocence or of the gods. Poetry and history describe some of these duels, which were armed judgments: for instance, that of Menelaus and Paris under the walls of Troy, and that of the Horatii and Curiatii, between Rome and Alba. It was a plan of divine providence, in order that between barbaric nations of scanty understanding and incapable of listening to reason war should not always beget war: that right and wrong might be to some degree determined by a belief in the favour or disfavour of the gods as the cause of victory or defeat. These ordeals by battle were accompanied and superseded by ordeals by verbal formulae, used in their religious habit of mind with the most minute and scrupulous exactitude and with care not to alter a single letter (_religio verborum_). Horatius, who by killing his sister fell under the law "_horrendi carminis,_" could never have been acquitted by the decemvirs, however free from blame they thought him; and the people acquitted him, says Livy, "more through admiration of his valour than the justice of his cause" (_magis admiratione virtutis quant iure causae_). In later days Roman law still retained this character of verbal precision to such a degree that it forms the crux of several of Plautus's comedies, in which panders are at the mercy of enamoured young men who have led them to violate some legal formula. The private law of this society corresponded closely with its economic constitution. It was an entirely natural society, confined to the necessaries of life, and did not use money; hence the law knew nothing of contracts formed, according to the law of a later period, by mere consent. All obligations were ratified by giving the hand; the first buying and selling was barter; the rent of a house consisted in a mortgage on the soil for building it, the rent of land in planting it; companies and credit were unknown.