https://doi.org/10.21697/zp.2020.20.4.08
Some legal expressions which once used to be generally known after some time become incomprehensible. An interesting example is the expression ex iure manum consertum, which occurs in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights. Aulus Gellius asked the well-known literary expert Sulpicius Apollinaris what it meant. Sulpicius Apollinaris said that he was a connoisseur of literature, not a legal specialist, and that the phrase did not occur in the Annals. But when Gellius told him it was a quote from Ennius, Sulpicius Apollinaris replied that Ennius must have cited it after a jurist, and told Gellius to ask the jurists and look in their works. Gellius conducted a search and eventually reached a conclusion that the expression applied to proceedings before a praetor’s court for the recovery of goods, often real property or some other property, which was to be presented to the praetor by “being brought in the hand” (de re in re praesenti in iure manum consererent). Recovery of the goods in question was then effected in an official proclamation. With time, as the state expanded, praetors were too busy with cases for the recovery of real property and did not want to travel to distant places to inspect the contested goods in situ, so they permitted the parties to the litigation to fetch a lump of earth from the disputed land and present it in court. This was done in contravention of the Law of the Twelve Tables, but with the tacit consent of the parties involved. The lump of earth “lawfully brought to court” represented the whole of the property, which was thereby recovered.
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