310 HISTORY OF ROMAN LAW 



we noted above, Roman law becomes in turn absolutely essential 

 for the proper understanding of religious literature. 



VI 



The intimate connection between the history of Roman law and 

 that of Language seems scarcely to need pointing out, when our 

 every-day speech is constantly and openly confessing its many 

 obligations to that law. This very word obligation, borrowed from 

 a " vocable of art " devised by the Roman jurists, is a word the his-' 

 tory of which is impossible to trace till we go back and discover 

 how they formed it and in what sense they used it. The same is true 

 of nouns such as person, privilege, prejudice, occupation, exception, 

 sequestration, confusion; of adjectives such as peremptory, manda- 

 tory, specific; and of verbs such as adopt, redeem, emancipate. All 

 these are derived from technical terms familiar to the Roman jurists, 

 yet their meaning has undergone such change in the course of ages 

 that their legal origin is quite forgotten. A long list of similar words 

 in our modern vocabularies could be made by simply working 

 through an English, French, or even -German dictionary. Some terms, 

 again, such as usufruct, plebiscite, manumission, servitude, have 

 passed from Roman into modern terminology without material 

 change in their original sense; while other nouns, such as solidarity, 

 have been taken, not from legal nouns, but from technical adjectives. 



Not only must we seek in Roman law the parents of many of our 

 words; there are some also of which the genealogy can be traced 

 through many gradations of meaning even in the hands of Roman 

 lawyers. For instance, their word humanitas signifies in different 

 passages: (1) human nature, (2) sensibility, (3) kindness, (4) com- 

 passion; while pietas denotes in different legal texts: (1) sense of duty 

 based on family ties, (2) conscientiousness shown by an employee, 

 (3) the feeling expected from a Christian toward his church and its 

 members. Nor does this enumeration by any means exhaust all the 

 shades of meaning given by Roman lawyers to those two words. 1 



It should also be remembered that among the most important 

 contributions to the history of Roman law are the curious details 

 and the citations from ancient texts which have been preserved by 

 Roman students of the science of language, such as Varro and Festus. 

 They alone have saved from oblivion, as one may see fully set forth 

 in the pages of Bruns, much antiquarian lore invaluable to the legal 

 historian. Even the best Roman lawyers were also dabblers in philo- 

 logy, as we can see from the derivations of legal terms which Gaius 

 and others have handed down to us. Though their efforts in this 

 line savor of the famous derivation of Erie Canal from Eridanus, 

 they are valuable as showing their authors' point of view. Nor does 

 1 Krtiger, Z. der Sav. Stift. fur RG, vol. 19, 1888, p. 6. 



