useless ancient roman law facts
- if you call someone to witness and they refused to show up, you are legally entitled to stand outside their house and scream, but only every third day
- you can sell your son into slavery once or twice, but after the third time he doesn’t have to put up with that shit anymore
- no wailing allowed at funerals
- also you can only have ONE funeral per person, don’t get greedy
- if your neighbor’s tree has a branch hanging into your yard, you can legally cut down the entire fucking tree
- however, if some of your neighbor’s fruit from his dumb tree falls into your yard, he can legally come into your yard to
snoop aroundget it- if you call someone to witness and they’re too sick or old to get to court themselves, you have to provide a cart for them to come in, but it doesn’t have to be, like, a nice cart if you don’t want it to
With the exception of the second one, I wouldn’t change any of these. They’re already perfect.
Confused about the 3rd one bc there’s literally a Latin verb for wailing and beating your chest out of grief, which I explicitly remember seeing in several funeral scenes.
However, I’ve only heard that word to describe the professional wailers (yes, they had those) hired at funerals.
So if that’s true that means people couldn’t wail so they hired outsiders to do it instead.
Can’t believe we killed the wailing market.a lot of people have actually been confused about this point so i’ll go ahead and explain it!
the law against wailing (as well as lacerating yourself) at a funeral falls kind of into the category of sumptuary laws- not exactly, because that’s a specific term, but it’s the same concept of preventing excess. there are several laws designed to prevent people from getting too extravagant with their funerals.
the thing is, you have to keep two things in mind when looking at the twelve tables. the first is, we aren’t exactly sure of the extent to which some of these laws were actually enforced. some of them entail pretty brutal punishments that we don’t think were necessarily carried out; for example, if a patrician was condemned to death, there was frequently enough time allowed for him to quickly pack up and go into exile. so while technically the twelve tables don’t allow hugely extravagant funerals, we know that people didn’t really heed that, especially in the case of public heroes.
the second thing is that these laws are really, really old, and not all of them stick around. probably the most famous example is that the law prohibiting marriage between plebeians and patricians was repealed after only a few years by the lex canuleia.
so yes, the twelve tables does outlaw excessive funerary practices, including wailing. but does that mean that anybody listened to that or that it remained a law? not at all.
