INTERDICT OF THE PRAETOR ON VIOLENCE
   
71 and 53 BC )

 


 
( Johnson, Coleman-Norton & Bourne, Ancient Roman Statutes, Austin, 1961, n. 78 and 244 ).
  

 
      In two passages of Cicero's early fragmentary oration in defense of his client Marcus Tullius, who in a countersuit has claimed damages for assault, because a neighbor with armed slaves had dispossessed him of his estate, Cicero quotes twice from the praetorian interdict on violence as it then existed.
      Almost a score of years later Cicero, when writing to Gaius Trebatius Testa, his young friend and protégé, who became a noted lawyer in the early Empire, playfully quotes to him an exception in the praetor's interdict about violence.
 

 
LATIN TEXT   ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Nisard, Cic., p. Tull., XII, 29
     
‘Unde dolo malo tuo, M. Tulli, M. Claudius aut familia aut procurator eius vi detrusus est’ ...
 
Whence on account of your malicious deception, Marcus Tullius, Marcus Claudius or his household or his agent has been dislodged by violence ...
     
Nisard, Cic., p. Tull., XIX, 44
     
‘Unde tu aut familia aut procurator tuus illum aut familiam aut procuratorem illius in hoc anno vi deiecisti’ ... ‘cum ille possideret’ ... ‘quod nec vi nec clam nec precario possideret’ ...
 
Whence you or your household or your agent have dispossessed by violence in this year the person designated or his household or his agent ... when that person was in possession ... what he was possessing neither by violence nor secretly nor by precarium ...
     
Nisard, Cic., ad Fam., VII, 13, 2
     
Quod tu prior vi hominibus armatis non veneris’ ...
 
Because you have come previously to dispossess your opponent through violence and by armed persons ...
     
Lenel, Das Edictum perpetuum, 3rd ed., n. 245 b
     
‘Unde tu illum vi hominibus coactis armatisve deiecisti aut familia tua deiecit, eo illum quaeque ille tunc ibi habuit restituas
Whence you have ejected a designated person by violence, with men collected or armed, or your dependents have ejected, thither you shall restore the designated person and whatever the designated person then had there.