A Handshake and a Broken Jar: Seeking Law in 110 AD

Marcus Valerius

Come, step out of the Argiletum with me. Mind the cart. Mind the boy with the basket of lupin beans, he'll sell you a cupful of the sweet ones before you can say no. And there, the fellow with the jug of posca, sour and cheap and good for a dry throat. Now we climb the steps, and look how the noise drops away. Not completely, never completely, this is Rome. But under the colonnade it softens, like a hand over a drum.

Marcus Valerius

I'm not here for pleasure this morning, my friend. I'm here because I've been a fool. Last month I bought a dozen amphorae for my wine, good tall ones, from a man who deals in them. We stood in the street, we shook hands, I counted out the coin, and he swore by his mother they'd come sound. Yesterday the carter unloaded them at my door. Four cracked. One has a hairline split you can only find by running your thumb along it, and I found it with my thumb, and I swore at it. And now the seller tells me they left his yard whole, so the damage is the carter's fault, or the road's, or mine.

Marcus Valerius

And what have I got to show him? My word. His word. A handshake that already feels like smoke.

Marcus Valerius

So. The scribes. See them along the wall? Each one has his folding stool and a little table, a bronze inkpot, or a clay one with that red shine to it, and a bundle of fine reeds for pens. Wax tablets tied shut with flax thread, stacked like loaves. And the smell, breathe it in. Cedar oil, and warm sealing wax, and under that a little sweat. That's the smell of promises being made official.

Marcus Valerius

But I don't go to the scribes first. Not with trouble like this. In the morning, a learned jurist sits in the portico, and any citizen may come and ask his opinion, and he gives it free. Free, mind you. A man like that doesn't sell his wisdom by the hour. He gives it because it earns him respect, his dignitas, and because Rome watches who sits where and who is sought out. I wait my turn behind a freedman with a land quarrel and a woman clutching a will.

Marcus Valerius

When I reach him, I tell it plainly. The dozen jars, the handshake, the coin, the cracks. He listens with his eyes half shut, and then he asks me one question. Only one. "Did he say the words?"

Marcus Valerius

The words. I know the words, every Roman child does. A man asks, "Spondesne?" Do you solemnly promise? And the other answers, "Spondeo!" I do promise. Question and answer, spoken together, clean as a coin dropping on stone. That's a stipulatio. That's a promise the law will look at. And I never asked. I was so pleased with the price that I shook a hand and went home whistling.

Marcus Valerius

He tells me, kindly, the way you'd tell a man his tunic is torn, that a handshake between friends is a fine and honorable thing, but it is not the same as a promise made in the proper form. If I carry this before the urban praetor with no formula and no witnesses, I may find I have very little to stand on. That's the substance of what he says. He doesn't promise me anything about the four cracked jars. He doesn't pretend. Then he nods to the next man, and I'm dismissed with a free opinion and an empty feeling.

Marcus Valerius

But he's given me what I came for, hasn't he? Because the jars are lost, probably. The next shipment doesn't have to be. So I walk down the colonnade to a scribe I know by sight, a thin man with ink on his knuckles, and I tell him I want a proper agreement for the next twelve jars. He charges a few asses, nothing that makes a man weep. He sets his tablet on his knee, dips his reed, and writes in that quick, slanting hand. What is bought, how many, in what condition, delivered where, and the promise itself, set down in the form it must take.

Marcus Valerius

Then comes the part nobody tells you about. Witnesses. A seal is only as good as the neighbors who stand behind it. So I go out into the street and I hunt for friends. Pollio the baker is just down the way with flour to his elbows, and he comes without complaint, wiping his hands on his tunic. Drusus the cobbler comes too, still holding an awl. Good men, honest men, the sort a praetor would believe.

Marcus Valerius

The scribe closes the tablets, winds the flax thread round and round, and drops a bead of wax over the knot. It's soft, still warm. Pollio presses his signet ring into it. Drusus, who has no ring, laughs and presses his thumb, and I'll tell you, a thumb in beeswax is a very Roman signature. You can see the whorls. Nobody could say that wasn't him.

Marcus Valerius

And then the seller arrives, grumbling, because I sent a boy to fetch him. I put the question to him in front of two witnesses and a scribe, with the whole portico passing by. "Spondesne?" He glances at the baker. He glances at the wax. And he grins, a little sourly, because he knows exactly what I've done. "Spondeo," he says.

Marcus Valerius

There. Three syllables, and a handshake turns into something a court can hold. The cracked jars? I'll swallow that loss, and next time I'll check every single one with my thumb before the carter leaves. But the next dozen are safe. Now come, I owe Pollio a cup of wine and Drusus one as well, and I know where the wine is good. Mind the lupin boy on the way down. He remembers faces.