A Pinch of Memory: Witnessing a Roman Debt

Marcus Valerius

The morning begins the way it always does, with a pinch of spelt for the household gods and a quiet word to my ancestors. Then I step out into the Argiletum, and Rome hits me all at once. Booksellers are propping open their shutters. Somebody's mule is complaining. And thirty paces ahead, outside a cobbler's stall, a man is shouting at another man's back.

Marcus Valerius

The shouter is Lucius, a cobbler I've known for years. He's built like a wine jar and has a voice to match. The man walking away from him is Titus, a leather dealer, who is wearing the face of someone who has heard nothing at all. Lucius is owed some two hundred sesterces for work done on a batch of boots, and he's been owed it since the Kalends. This is the sort of small, sour debt that fills a Roman street.

Marcus Valerius

Now, I want you to understand something before this goes any further. There's no magistrate's officer coming to settle this. No bailiff, no clerk with a warrant. The city watch, the vigiles, keep an eye out for fires and night brawls. A quarrel over boots in daylight belongs to the two men and nobody else. If Lucius wants justice, he must go and fetch it himself, with his own hands, right here on the street.

Marcus Valerius

Quo tu, turpissime? Where are you off to, you scoundrel? That's the street talking, and it's not polite. Then Lucius draws himself up, and his voice changes. It goes stiff and old, the way a man speaks when he's reciting something older than the Republic. In ius te voco. I summon you to court.

Marcus Valerius

That formula comes from the Twelve Tables, our oldest written law, set down around four hundred and fifty years before Christ. Table One begins with it: if one summons another to court, let him go. Let him go. Not let him think about it.

Marcus Valerius

Titus keeps walking. He ducks, he stalls, he studies a doorway as if it held great secrets. And this is where Lucius is stuck. He can't just grab the man and haul him off. A hand laid on a free citizen without proper cause is assault, what we call iniuria, and the law would turn on him quickly. To lay hands on a man who's dodging a summons, he needs a witness to the dodging. An independent, adult, male Roman citizen.

Marcus Valerius

Lucius looks around the street. And he looks at me.

Marcus Valerius

Licet antestari? May I take you to witness?

Marcus Valerius

Here's the thing nobody tells a visitor. When a man asks you that, you have about three heartbeats to decide your next few years. Saying yes isn't a favor. It's a debt you take on, in public, in front of strangers.

Marcus Valerius

Because if you let yourself be called as a witness, and then you don't turn up in court to say what you saw, the Twelve Tables, in Table Eight, have a name for you. Inprobus intestabilisque. Wicked, and disqualified from witnessing. And intestabilis means forever. You can never testify again. You can't witness a will. You can't stand by at a formal sale of property. And no other citizen can call you in to witness his own contract. For a man like me, who sells wine, whose whole trade rests on other men's word, that's ruin. Not a fine. A kind of civic death.

Marcus Valerius

So I could look away. Plenty of Romans do. You develop a talent for finding something fascinating in the sky. But I've watched Titus dodge this man for weeks, and I've seen the work on those boots. Licet, I say. You may. And I tilt my head toward him.

Marcus Valerius

Lucius reaches out and pinches the soft bottom of my ear. Firmly, almost kindly. It's a strange feeling, a stranger's fingers there, and it isn't casual in the least. Pliny the Elder explains why, in his Natural History. In the lowest part of the ear, he writes, is the seat of memory, and that's the spot we touch when we call someone to witness. Our grandfathers believed memory lived right there. So a witness isn't only asked to remember. He's marked to.

Marcus Valerius

You can still see this in the shops of the gem cutters. More than fifty engraved stones survive, from the late Republic into the Empire, showing two fingers pinching an ear, and beside them a single word. Memento. Remember. Some of the Greek ones say the same in Greek. People wore that gesture on their rings.

Marcus Valerius

And now the law is on Lucius's side. He catches Titus by the tunic, and when the man twists away, Lucius takes him by the neck of it and drags. Obtorto collo, we say, with the neck twisted. Toward the Forum, toward the praetor's tribunal, down the whole length of a busy street. Titus shouts. Lucius shouts louder. Shopkeepers lean out. A laundress puts down her basket to watch. In Rome, a quarrel draws a crowd the way a spilled amphora draws flies.

Marcus Valerius

I trail behind them, ear still warm, a living piece of evidence with a wine stain on his sleeve.

Marcus Valerius

But here's what I love about our law. It doesn't want the praetor to hear this at all, if it can be helped. The old rule says that while the two men are still on the road together, they should settle it. Rem ubi pacunt, orato. Where they agree the matter, announce it. A dispute on the way to court is the cheapest moment to end it. Or a third man may step in as a vindex, a guarantor, and promise that the defendant will appear. Then the hands come off him.

Marcus Valerius

Passing the Basilica Aemilia, a stranger pushes through the crowd, and it isn't a guarantor. It's Titus's own brother in law, red in the face, with a purse. There's whispering, a count of coins, one furious look. The sum is two hundred, less a small discount, and a promise of leather for next month. Lucius lets go of the tunic. Titus smooths it down and walks off with all the dignity of a wet cat.

Marcus Valerius

Lucius turns to me and clasps my arm. No court. No praetor. I was never needed at the tribunal, and I'm glad of it. But he nods, and so do I, because we both know what the pinch meant.

Marcus Valerius

That's Rome, friend. No police to rescue you, no officer to speak for you. A man's remedy lives in his own voice, and a witness lives in his own ear. Walk the Argiletum long enough, and sooner or later someone will ask for yours. Think carefully before you say licet.