/3/
If no other right were given but to reduce a debtor to slavery,
the law might be taken to look only to compensation, and to be
modelled on the natural working of self-redress. /4/ The
principle of our own law, that taking a man's body on execution
satisfies the debt, although he is not detained an hour, seems to
be explained in that way. But the right to put to death looks
like vengeance, and the division of the body shows that the debt
was conceived very literally to inhere in or bind the body with a
vinculum juris.
Whatever may be the true explanation of surrender in connection
with contracts, for the present purpose we need not go further
than the common case of noxoe deditio for wrongs. Neither is the
seeming adhesion of liability to the very body which did the harm
of the first importance. [15] The Roman law dealt mainly with
living creatures,-- with animals and slaves. If a man was run
over, it did not surrender the wagon which crushed him, but the
ox which drew the wagon. /1/ At this stage the notion is easy to
understand. The desire for vengeance may be felt as strongly
against a slave as against a freeman, and it is not without
example nowadays that a like passion should be felt against an
animal.
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