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Intestacy in Roman Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

John Crook
John Crook
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
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Extract

The purpose of this paper is to defend a sound old doctrine against a brilliant, amusing and superficially plausible attack by Professor Daube. The doctrine is that propounded – admittedly in an extreme form – by Sir Henry Maine, that Roman society had a ‘singular horror of intestacy’, a ‘passion for testacy’; in his Gray Lectures of 1966, summing up a rather fuller case made in Tulane Law Review, 1965, Professor Daube claimed to demonstrate that the evidence for this doctrine was ludicrously inadequate and the notion in any case a priori absurd. His judgement has been endorsed, with some corroborative arguments, by Professor Watson, and has achieved the approval of Professor Brunt.

According to Daube the case in favour of the view that Romans usually made wills and had a dread of dying intestate consists of the following ‘chief’ arguments: that in the Twelve Tables a person who has not made a will is called intestatus, and the negative form of the word implies that it is the exception; secondly that, in Plutarch's famous story, the elder Cato said that one of the three things he regretted in life was to have spent a single day ἀδιάθετος, and finally that in Plautus' Curculio a man is cursed with the words intestatus vivito. With these three arguments Daube has – and gives – a good deal of fun, claiming, in the upshot, to have blown them all sky-high and thus to have demolished the entire positive case for the old view.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 19 , 1973 , pp. 38 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

page 38 note 1 Ancient Law (1861), p. 218Google Scholar.

page 38 note 2 Roman Law: Linguistic, Social and Philosophical Aspects (the 1966 Gray Lectures) (1969), pp. 71–5Google Scholar; ‘The Preponderance of Intestacy at Rome’, Tulane Law Review XXXIX (1965), 253 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 38 note 3 The Law of Succession in the Later Roman Republic (1971), pp. 175–6Google Scholar.

page 38 note 4 Italian Manpower 225 B.C. – A.D. 14 (1971), p. 141Google Scholar: ‘D. Daube has powerfully argued…’.

page 38 note 5 Brushing aside Cic., Tusc. Disp. 1, 31Google Scholar and Caesar, , B.G. 1, 39Google Scholaren passant.

page 39 note 1 F.I.R.A. III, no. 47.

page 39 note 2 P. Oxy. 2857, published since Daube wrote.

page 39 note 3 Il testamento romano attraverso la prassi documentale I (1966), 10–70Google Scholar.

page 39 note 4 Plut., Cato mai. 9, 9Google Scholar, .

page 40 note 1 ‘Le troisième remords de Caton’, in Revue des études grecques LXXX (1967), pp. 195 ffGoogle Scholar. I owe this reference to Mr G. A. Christodoulou. (Flacelière is the editor of the Budé Plutarch, Cato maior.)

page 40 note 2 He quotes this sense from Amyot, Reiske and the Didot edition.

page 40 note 3 L.S.J. 9: , not disposed or set in order, Sch. Ar., Nu. 1370Google Scholar, etc.; . Sch., Il. 22. 487. 2Google Scholar. having made no will, intestate, Plu., Cat. Ma. 9Google Scholar, D. Chr. 54.4, P. Oxy. 105.6 (ii A.D.), al. b. not disposed of by will, P. Grenf. i 17 (ii B.C.)Google Scholar, Sammelb. 4638. 5'. Mr Christodoulou has kindly pointed out to me that in the passage quoted from the Homeric scholia the standard texts have not but (the reference is, of course, to the suspect lines about the miseries of an orphaned future for Astyanax). Secondly, Sch. Ar., Nu. 1367Google Scholar (as the reference should read) equates with , of Aeschylus' language. And thirdly, not in Liddell and Scott, Schol. Soph., Aj. 776Google Scholar gives (or ) as a gloss on , presumably meaning ‘incapable of being set in order’, i.e. ‘intractable’.

page 40 note 4 Dio of Prusa LIV (de Socrate), 4Google Scholar. Socrates is described as .

page 40 note 5 Passow–Rost–Palm, Handwörterbuch (1841)Google Scholar, ‘, Adv. ohne Anordnung, d.i. (a) ungeordnet, nicht gut ausgearbeitet, Schol. Hom. u. Byzant., (b) keine Anordnung od. Verfügung getroffen habend, bes. ohne ein Testament gemacht zu haben, Dio Chrysost. Bei Plut. Cat. maj. 9 scheint es am füglichsten mit Korai von der Unterlassung einer festen Zeiteintheilung verstanden zu werden.’

page 40 note 6 Stephanus–Hase, , Thesaurus (1831)Google Scholar, ‘ (a ), qui dispositus non est, Ĭnordinatus. Exp. etiam Intestatus. Apud Plut. autem Catone maj. (9) (quoted) quidam interpr.: Qui nihil egit, quidam, Qui nihil rei seriae egit. Ego autem potius crediderim dici Qui rerum suarum nihil composuit. Sic tamen ut ne haec quidem interpr. mihi satisfaciat [Ad Plut. 1. haec Coray, t. 2, p. 452: B. . 101), . Sed Intestatus interpretatur Schaef. t. 5, p. 51, all. h. l. Dion. Chrys. t. 2, p. 281, l. 40, de Socrate (quoted)]’.

page 41 note 1 Aethiopica, ed. Bekker, , II, 30 and v, 18Google Scholar.

page 41 note 2 Ibid. II, 8.

page 41 note 3 Plaut., Curc. 621–2Google Scholar:

PH. ambula in ius. TH. non eo. PH. licet antestari? TH. non licet.

PH. Iuppiter te †male† perdat, intestatus vivito.

Ibid. 695:

CA. hocine pacto indemnatum atque intestatum me abripi?

Idem, Mil. Glor. 1414–17:

PY. iuro per Iovem et Mavortem me nociturum nemini

quod ego hie hodie vapularim, iureque id factum arbitror;

et si intestatus non abeo hinc, bene agitur pro noxia.

PE. quid si id non faxis? PY. ut vivam semper intestabilis.

page 41 note 4 Such has been the usual interpretation of intestata senectus at Juvenal 1, 114, though Housman, in C.R. XIII (1899), pp. 432–4Google Scholar, argued that in that context the word intestatus must mean ‘unattested’, ‘unexampled’, hence, as might now be said, ‘statistically negligible’.

page 42 note 1 Suet., vita Hor. 76 (Rostagni)Google Scholar.

page 42 note 2 Cic., pro Clu. 44–5Google Scholar, suberat etiam alia causa maior quae Oppianici, hominis avarissimi atque audacissimi, mentem maxime commovebat. nam Habitus usque ad illius iudicii tempus nullum testamentum umquam fecerat; neque enim legare quicquam eius modi matri poterat in animum inducere neque testamento nomen omnino praetermittere parentis. id cum Oppianicus sciret – neque enim erat obscurum – intellegebat Habito mortuo bona eius omnia ad matrem esse ventura.

page 42 note 3 Rendered, of course, the more paradoxically acute by the fact that if he did not make a will his detested mother would succeed totally upon intestacy – presumably because she had been married to his father with manus and so was his nearest agnate.

page 42 note 4 Fronto, , ad Ant. imp. II, 1 and 2Google Scholar (van den Hout pp. 98–9) (cf. ad amicos I, 14, van den Hout p. 173), an hereditas Matidiae a vobis non adibitur? summo genere, summis opibus nobilissima femina de vobis optime merita intestata obierit? ita prosus eveniet ut cui funus publicum decreveris ei ademeris testamentum?

The circumstances of the testamentary imbroglio referred to in this letter are not easily comprehensible. They were discussed at length, though in some respects inconclusively and in others less than convincingly, by Kübler, , ‘Das Perlenhalsband der Prinzessin Matidia’, in Festschr. Paul Koschaker II, 353 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 43 note 1 So Kübler, art. cit., ‘wir sehen aus Frontos Worten, für wie unmöglich man es in Rom hielt, dass ein vornehmer Mensch ohne Testament starb’.

page 43 note 2 Gai., Inst. II, 224Google Scholar. Exactly what was at issue in the case of great-aunt Matidia.

page 43 note 3 Cicero, , Il in Verr. I, 104–5 and 111Google Scholar.

page 43 note 4 Idem, de finibus 11, 55 and 58. See also Watson, op. cit. pp. 35–9.

page 44 note 1 R.E. XII, 2418 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 44 note 2 In the passages of Cicero quoted on p. 43 nn. 3, 4.