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Hello everyone. I just joined your forum a couple of days ago and absolutely love it. You have a great site here.
I’m curious about your opinion on something Cicero mentions. How would you interpret this part of the Twelve Tables (bolded)?
[quote] This also I observe — that he who would properly have been called “a fighting enemyâ€
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Okay, I’ll go out on a limb and say that this was to protect foreigners. We’ll see where this leads.
1) Early Rome had a tradition of inviting foreign immigration. Think of the asylum of Romulus. So Rome wanted to have an encouraging legal system for foreigners, so they had some manner for foreigners to go to court and reinforced their right to own property.
2) Early Rome had horizontal social mobility. Think of Appius Claudius or the Valerii moving to Rome from the Sabine country and being rewarded with citizenship, land, and (at least for Appius Claudius) senatorial status. These aristocrats would not have migrated without legal guarantees for their rights.
3) The Latin commercial right allowed Latins to enter into legally binding contracts in another Latin state as well as to own property there. Sherwin-White in The Roman Citizenship and T.J. Cornell in The Beginnings of Rome and Cambridge Ancient History have argued that these rights were a common feature of archaic Italy before being codified in later laws which granted the so-called “Latin Rights.â€
