Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

armed force. That is, if no one is entirely innocent, the lesser degree of force is to be preferred. Thus various areas of the law worked together to discourage violence.

Defamation

The earliest Roman law may have provided some protection against defamation, if that is the point of the ban in the Twelve Tables on “evil chants.” It seems more likely, however, that that provision was actually directed against magical spells. If so, then there was no known legal defense against defamation until the expansion of iniuria law in the mid second century brought it under the same heading as personal injury (Chapter 18). We noted earlier that Roman culture contained a number of standard devices for public insult. These seem generally to have been used by the less powerful against the more power ful. So, for instance, a man who thought his property had been damaged by a wealthy neighbor’s construction might follow that man in the streets, dressed in mourning garb. We know that an iniuria action could arise not only from explicit verbal abuse, but also from these more symbolic forms of public sham ing. In part, the creation of these legal penalties may have been meant to help the already powerful. But there may also be a more broad-minded reason to group all these activities together with physical assault. The activities penalized under the newer scheme were likely to lead to violent situations. American law has occasionally used the notion of “fighting words” (in the

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