Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

12) is a separate institution native to Roman law. It is a form of contract in which a piece of property is offered as security for some other kind of payment, whether that payment is part of a sale, a lease, or a loan. On the one hand, the Romans seem to be taking a foreign institution and making it conform, more or less, to Roman rules. On the other hand, from a strictly Roman point of view, they could have just skipped the arra altogether and spoken only of pledges, at least in many cases. The fact that the Greek name is used anyway suggests that the very word had some point. In particular, it suggests a legal force for the term. A deposit or earnest money has practical and perhaps social effects even in a system where it has no special legal sta tus, but it would have had those effects in Rome even if it were just called a pledge. It is worth adding the Greek name only if that name itself is thought to explain something new about the transaction. Here, then, we have an alien legal institution that had no official standing in the jurists’ works and that was considerably reshaped by its contact with Roman law, but that still had at least a minor effect on the day-to-day workings of Roman law. The last case is centered not on a particular legal institution but on a person. Some decades ago, we were lucky enough to recover from a cave in Israel the preserved remains of a set of second-century legal papers of a woman named Babatha. Most of these documents involve disputes over family property, though a few outside commercial transactions are included. The area had recently come under Roman rule, but the parties (mostly Jews) were not Roman citizens. There is tremendous

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