Lex Aquilia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Lex Aquilia was enacted at some point in the 3rd century BC, during the Roman Republic. It held that a person who wrongfully killed another's slave or herd animal owed compensation. The debt was not the victim's value at the moment of death, but the highest price that slave or animal had reached during the preceding year.

  This Roman plebiscite addressed what jurists called damnum iniuria datum, meaning damage unlawfully inflicted. The category was a form of delict, related to but distinct from what modern common law systems or Scots law call a tort. Three chapters gave the law its structure.

  Only two of those chapters proved durable. The middle one lost legal force so quickly that classical Roman jurists barely commented on it. The exact date of enactment remains contested, with three competing theories placing it anywhere from around 287 BC to around 200 BC.

• 2. Burning, Breaking, Killing

  ›

  Chapter one of the Lex Aquilia addressed the unlawful killing of slaves and herd animals. The four-footed animals the law protected went by the Latin name pecus. Any person who wrongfully killed another's slave or such an animal had to pay the owner. The payment was set at whatever peak value that slave or animal had commanded at any point during the preceding year.

  The third chapter addressed a broader category of harm. Wrongful burning, breaking, or rending of any property belonging to another person fell within its reach. The Latin verbs for these acts were urere for burning, frangere for breaking, and rumpere for rupture. The measure of compensation was not the past year's highest value but the object's worth during the thirty days nearest the damage.

  The word rumpere carried an unusual amount of interpretive weight. Jurists generally treated it as equivalent to corrumpere, meaning to spoil broadly. That reading brought a very large number of additional damage types within the chapter's scope. A separate technical debate turned on the Latin word fuit. Most readings treated it as past tense, fixing compensation to the value of the damaged item before the harm occurred. A minority reading suggested the text could be prospective, entitling the owner to the full diminution in value going forward.

  Gaius, in his Institutes, described chapter two as giving an action against an adstipulator who had fraudulently cancelled a debt owed to the stipulator. This provision had nothing to do with physical damage to property, and it fell out of use almost immediately after the law's enactment. The jurist Ulpian, writing in the classical period, recorded the chapter's fate in a single sentence preserved in the Digest of Justinian: 'The second chapter of the lex has fallen out of use.' The Institutes of Justinian, at section I4.3.12, confirmed the chapter was no longer in force by the 5th century AD. The near-total absence of commentary from classical jurists suggests the chapter died not long after it was written. The debate over when exactly this law was passed proved as contentious as the questions it addressed.

• 3. Contested Origins

  ›

  Around 287 or 286 BC, according to the Byzantine jurist Theophilus, the Roman plebiscite now called the Lex Aquilia took effect. No incontestable theory has ever been put forward for this date, or for any other, and three competing accounts have attracted scholarly support at different times.

  Theophilus placed the law in this period while making a broader argument about Roman legal history. His reference was incidental rather than the main focus of his work, and scholars have treated his account with some skepticism as a result. On the 287-286 BC theory, the Lex Aquilia was enacted right after the Lex Hortensia. That earlier law gave plebiscites the power to bind all Roman citizens without Senate ratification, for the first time. Proponents argue the Lex Aquilia used that new power to address Plebeian grievances against the Patrician class during a period of political upheaval.

  A second theory dates the law to around 200 BC. Proponents argue it was a response to heavy inflation following the Second Punic War. Fixed financial penalties had become difficult to apply when prices were shifting dramatically. The Lex Aquilia's flexible approach to calculating damages offered an alternative. Critics note that Romans may well have needed that flexibility before 200 BC, particularly for the broader property damage the third chapter addressed.

  A third suggestion connects the law to a consul named Aquillius who also held the office of tribune of the Plebs around 259 BC. Roman legislation was frequently named for its sponsor. The name Aquillius may reflect exactly such an origin, though the historical record on this point is thin. Whatever date historians settle on, the Lex Aquilia's terms were narrow by design, and the question of who exactly could use it proved nearly as consequential as what it covered.

• 4. Limits and Remedies

  ›

  The Lex Aquilia's first chapter came with a demanding requirement for how the harm had to be inflicted. The killing had to be direct. Roman jurists expressed this as corpori corpore, meaning on the body of the victim by the body of the perpetrator. A person who arranged for another to carry out a killing could not be sued under the chapter. Neither could someone whose actions only indirectly caused a slave's death.

  Only a Roman citizen could bring a claim under the Lex Aquilia, a requirement that excluded non-citizens regardless of the damage they suffered. Among those citizens, only the strict legal owner of the damaged property, the dominus, had standing to sue. Someone with a lesser ownership interest, but who was not the dominus, was excluded.

  Monetary compensation was the only remedy the Lex Aquilia could provide. No court applying this law could force an offender to replace a killed slave, a slaughtered animal, or destroyed goods. If a defendant denied liability and the iudex ruled against them anyway, the amount owed was doubled.

  Negligence alone was enough to satisfy the Lex Aquilia's wrongfulness requirement, without any need to prove deliberate intent. The one recognized exception was self-defense: an act that could be proved justified was not unlawful, though jurists disagreed about precisely when justification applied.

  An in factum action provided an alternative path where the Lex Aquilia's strict requirements could not be satisfied. If the damage was inflicted indirectly, the aggrieved party could pursue this route against the person responsible. The same applied if the loss fell on someone other than the strict legal owner. The in factum action meant the corpori corpore standard, strict as it was, did not leave every indirect injury without a remedy in Roman law.