Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

to have been of much interest to the authorities. There was some interest in preserving the existence of familial rites, per haps especially the maintenance of ancestor worship, but there were no uniform regulations for the specific content. Moreover, what clear and specific rules did exist even outside the family often governed the practice of local cultic activity, the equiva lent today of, say, rules on how to say mass in a single Catholic church: who could hold particular priesthoods and what taboos they faced, how to perform certain sacrifices, how to dispose of a god’s property. In this chapter, I will not treat rules that are strictly about ritual practice. Rather, I will point out the narrow respects in which religious law could impinge on the human world. According to Roman law, property could be subject to “human” or “divine” law, though of course both kinds of law told human beings, not gods, what to do. The divine law offered up two different important kinds of sacred objects (there was also a third type, but we can safely ignore it). What all the types share is the idea that an object subject to divine law is no longer available for human sale, gift, or even ownership. If formerly ordinary property became sacred, the owner’s inter est and all associated rights (such as servitudes; see Chapter 14) were extinguished. Where the types differ, at least in theory, is primarily in how an object comes to be sacred. The first Sacred Things

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