Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

it was carried out by an authorized person. (You can’t make your neighbor’s land religiosus by sneaking over and burying your late uncle there.) Naturally, there were disputes among the lawyers about just what constituted “burial” and who was “authorized,” but the major problem with this kind of land is more basic. The legal sources all take for granted the general principle mentioned earlier and apparently confirmed for sacer property by the case of Cicero’s house: sacred land is taken out of the world of human ownership and commerce. In fact, the principle was broadened somewhat. For technical reasons, land outside Italy could not be sacer or religiosus , but the legal and land-surveying texts assert that it was to be treated as such anyway. Yet in practice it seems to have been quite common to buy and sell tombs and especially to dispose of them by will. Nor was this some kind of secret black market. We know of the practice from, among other things, numerous inscriptions on the tombs themselves that attempted to control their transfer [20–22] . Various theories have been suggested to explain this, mostly variations on the idea that something other than the actual tomb was being owned, bought, sold, and so on, but no one has come up with a genuinely satisfying solution (see fur ther the discussion in Chapter 22).

Checking with the Gods

The Romans had a variety of devices for communicating with the gods – watching birds or lightning, observing the entrails

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