The History of Rome

Dealings with countries strictly foreign were carried on in a different fashion and by means of other forms. In very early times treaties as to commerce and legal redress must have been entered into with the Caerites and other friendly peoples, and must have formed the basis of the international private law (ius gentium), which gradually became developed in Rome alongside of the law of the land. An indication of the formation of such a law is found in the remarkable mutuum, "the exchange" (from mutare like dividuus) - a form of loan, which was not based like the nexum upon a binding declaration of the debtor expressly emitted before witnesses, but upon the mere transit of the money from one hand to another, and which as evidently originated in dealings with foreigners as the nexum in business dealings at home.  It is accordingly a significant fact that the word reappears in Sicilian Greek as moiton; and with this is to be connected the reappearance of the Latin carcer in the Sicilian karkaron. Since it is philologically certain that both words were originally Latin, their occurrence in the local dialect of Sicily becomes an important testimony to the frequency of the dealings of Latin traders in the island, which led to their borrowing money there and becoming liable to that imprisonment for debt, which was everywhere in the earlier systems of law the consequence of the non-repayment of a loan. Conversely, the name of the Syracusan prison, "stone-quarries" or latomiai, was transferred at an early period to the enlarged Roman state-prison, the lautumiae.

Character of the Roman Law