useless ancient roman law facts

voidbat:

thoodleoo:

thoodleoo:

• if you call someone to witness and they refused to show up, you are legally entitled to stand outside their house and scream, but only every third day
• you can sell your son into slavery once or twice, but after the third time he doesn’t have to put up with that shit anymore
• no wailing allowed at funerals
• also you can only have ONE funeral per person, don’t get greedy
• if your neighbor’s tree has a branch hanging into your yard, you can legally cut down the entire fucking tree
• however, if some of your neighbor’s fruit from his dumb tree falls into your yard, he can legally come into your yard to snoop around get it
• if you call someone to witness and they’re too sick or old to get to court themselves, you have to provide a cart for them to come in, but it doesn’t have to be, like, a nice cart if you don’t want it to

#…if these are actually true im gonna scream (via @dragonchantant)

they are indeed real! they’re from the twelve tables, a roman law text so old that it’s hard for even people who are well-versed in latin to read by the text is archaic (also half of it is missing but whatever)

while we’re on the subject, here are some more good ones that i forgot to put in:

• the penalty for writing a song slandering someone (it’s very specific on the song bit) is getting clubbed to death
• if you hurt someone (or if you just sort of inconvenience them) through magic arts, the penalty for that is also death
• however if you maim someone’s limb through normal limb-maiming processes you just sort of have to figure things out between yourselves
• if there’s a road right next to your property, feel free to build a fence around it to prevent people from driving into it, but if you don’t build your own fence then tough shit
• if you waste all your money you can legally be prevented from wasting even more of your money
• if you’re a woman and you live with a man for a year, that technically makes you married, unless you spend three successive nights at somewhere other than his house, in which case you’re not married i guess

i guess.