ON THE RIGHT OF KILLING AN ENEMY IN LAWFUL WAR, AND COMMITTING OTHER ACTS OF HOSTILITY. General explanation of the effects of formal war--Distinction between lawful and innocent impunity--Merit of the latter--Examples added to explain it--General effects of former war considered with respect to lawful impunity--The reason of their introduction--Historical testimonies--By this right all persons, found within an enemy's territory, objects of hostility--Also all going thither before the war--The subjects of an enemy liable to be seized everywhere, except protected by the laws of a neutral territory--Case of women and children--Case of prisoners--Of those whose voluntary offer of surrender is rejected--Unconditional surrender--Retaliation--Obstinate defence--Hostages. I. Servius in his comment on the passage of Virgil, where that poet says that war "will authorise mutual acts of destruction and rapine," in tracing the fecial or herald's law to Ancus Martius, and even beyond him to a still more remote period, remarks that, "if ever the persons or property of subjects, belonging to the Roman state, were seized and carried off by any other nation, the principal Herald, or King at arms went out with the sacred ministers, who presided at the making of solemn treaties, and proceeding to the verge of the territories of the offending nation, declared with a loud voice the cause of the war, and the refusal of that nation either to restore what had been seized, or to deliver up the aggressors to justice. After this he threw a spear to indicate that war and all its consequences were from that moment begun." The commentator had previously observed that the ancients gave the name of rapine to every act of hostility even where there was no act of plunder committed; and they likewise called every kind of restitution a satisfaction. By this explanation we learn that whenever war is proclaimed between two states or sovereigns, it is accompanied with certain rights or consequences, which do not NECESSARILY belong to war itself. And this is perfectly conformable to the examples from the Roman Lawyers, which have been before produced.