as clear and
precise; no symbol was employed, no institution was superfluous.
It was not cruel; everything necessary was performed without much
ceremony, even the punishment of death; that a free man could not
be tortured was a primitive maxim of Roman law, to obtain which
other peoples have had to struggle for thousands of years. Yet this
law was frightful in its inexorable severity, which we cannot suppose
to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for
it was really the law of the people; more terrible than Venetian
-piombi- and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments
which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors' towers
of the rich. But the greatness of Rome was involved in, and was
based upon, the fact that the Roman people ordained for itself and
endured a system of law, in which the eternal principles of freedom
and of subordination, of property and of legal redress, reigned
and still at the present day reign unadulterated and unmodified.

Notes for Book I Chapter XI

1. This "chariot-seat"--philologically no other explanation can
well be given (comp. Servius ad Aen. i. 16)--is most simply explained
by supposing that the king alone was entitled to ride in a chariot
within the city (v. The King)--whence originated the privilege
subsequently accorded to the chief magistrate on solemn occasions--and
that originally, so long as there was no elevated tribunal, he
gave judgment, at the comitium or wherever else he wished, from
the chariot-seat.

2. I. V. The Housefather and His Household

3. The story of the death of king Tatius, as given by Plutarch
(Rom. 23, 24), viz. that kinsmen of Tatius had killed envoys from
Laurentum; that Tatius had refused the complaint of the kinsmen
of the slain for redress; that they then put Tatius to death; that
Romulus acquitted the murderers of Tatius, on the ground that murder
had been expiated by murder; but that, in consequence of the penal
judgments of the gods that simultaneously fell upon Rome and
Laurentum, the perpetrators of both murders were in the sequel
subjected to righteous punishment--this story looks quite like a
historical version of the abolition of blood-revenge, just as the
introduction of the -provocatio- lies at the foundation of the myth
of the Horatii. The versions of the same story that occur elsewhere
certainly present considerable variations, but they seem to be
confused or dressed up.

4.