Without such a
personification, anger towards lifeless things would have been
transitory, at most. It is noticeable that the commonest example
in the most primitive customs and laws is that of a tree which
falls upon a man, or from which he falls and is killed. We can
conceive with comparative ease how a tree might have been put on
the same footing with animals. It certainly was treated like
them, and was delivered to the relatives, or chopped to pieces
for the gratification of a real or simulated passion. /1/
In the Athenian process there is also, no doubt, to be traced a
different thought. Expiation is one of the ends most insisted on
by Plato, and appears to have been the purpose of the procedure
mentioned by Aeschines. Some passages in the Roman historians
which will be mentioned again seem to point in the same
direction. /2/
Another peculiarity to be noticed is, that the liability seems to
have been regarded as attached to the body doing the damage, in
an almost physical sense. An untrained intelligence only
imperfectly performs the analysis by which jurists carry
responsibility back to the beginning of a chain of causation. The
hatred for anything giving us pain, which wreaks itself on the
manifest cause, and which leads even civilized man to kick a door
when it pinches his finger, is embodied in the noxoe deditio and
[12] other kindred doctrines of early Roman law.
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