ous refinements of modern criticism. After the judicial proof or
confession of the debt, thirty days of grace were allowed before a Roman
was delivered into the power of his fellow-citizen. In this private
prison twelve ounces of rice were his daily food; he might be bound with
a chain of fifteen pounds weight, and his misery was thrice exposed in
the market-place, to solicit the compassion of his friends and
countrymen. At the expiration of sixty days the debt was discharged by
the loss of liberty or life; the insolvent debtor was either put to
death or sold in foreign slavery beyond the Tiber; but, if several
creditors were alike obstinate and unrelenting, they might legally
dismember his body and satiate their revenge by this horrid partition.

The advocates for this savage law have insisted that it must strongly
operate in deterring idleness and fraud from contracting debts which
they were unable to discharge; but experience would dissipate this
salutary terror by proving that no creditor could be found to exact this
unprofitable penalty of life or limb. As the manners of Rome were
insensibly polished, the criminal code of the decemvirs was abolished by
the humanity of accusers, witnesses, and judges; and impunity became the
consequence of immoderate rigor. The Porcian and Valerian laws
prohibited the magistrates from inflicting on a free citizen any
capital, or even corporal, punishment, and the obsolete statutes of
blood were artfully, and perhaps truly, ascribed to the spirit, not of
patrician but of regal tyranny.

In the absence of penal laws and the insufficiency of civil actions, the
peace and justice of the city were imperfectly maintained by the private
jurisdiction of the citizens. The malefactors who replenish our jails
are the outcasts of society, and the crimes for which they suffer may be
commonly ascribed to ignorance, poverty, and brutal appetite. For the
perpetration of similar enormities, a vile plebeian might claim and
abuse the sacred character of a member of the republic; but on the proof
or suspicion of guilt, the slave or the stranger was nailed to a cross:
and this strict and summary justice might be exercised without restraint
over the greatest part of the populace of Rome. Each family contained a
domestic tribunal, which was not confined, like that of the praetor, to
the cognizance of external actions; virtuous principles and habits were
inculcated by the discipline of education, and the Ro