imagined law, for it was said in one of the speeches of
Aeschines, that "we banish beyond our borders stocks and stones
and steel, voiceless and mindless things, if they chance to kill
a man; and if a man commits suicide, bury the hand that struck
the blow afar from its body." This is mentioned quite as an
every-day matter, evidently without thinking it at all
extraordinary, only to point an antithesis to the honors heaped
upon Demosthenes. /3/ As late as the second century after Christ
the traveller Pausanias observed with some surprise that they
still sat in judgment on inanimate things in the Prytaneum. /4/
Plutarch attributes the institution to Draco. /5/

In the Roman law we find the similar principles of the noxoe
deditio gradually leading to further results. The Twelve Tables
(451 B.C.) provided that, if an animal had done damage, either
the animal was to be surrendered or the damage paid for. /6/ We
learn from Gains that the same rule was applied to the torts of
children or slaves, /7/ and there is some trace of it with regard
to inanimate things.

The Roman lawyers, not looking beyond their own [9] system or
their own time, drew on their wits for an explanation which would
show that the law as they found it was reasonable. Gaius said
that it was unjust that the fault of children or slaves should be
a source of loss to their parents or owners beyond their own
bodies, and Ulpian reasoned that a fortiori this was true of
things devoid of life, and therefore incapable of fault. /1/ This
way of approaching the question seems to deal with the right of
surrender as if it were a limitation of a liability incurred by a
parent or owner, which would naturally and in the first instance