Coll. 1.0. DE SICARIIS [ET HOMICIDIIS CASU VEL VOLUNTATE] – the short lecture on transformation of Roman law against „dagger-men” into the common law on homicide

Abstract

Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis at the turn of the republic cannot be recognized as a law against homicide. The aim of the Law was to ensure safety and public order by eliminating criminal
pathologies that threatened these public goods. Thus, the Law was of a specifically preventive and police nature. The image of it separated from the later, rich, after all, tradition of the Law, written by the legislative factors of the period of the Principate and the Dominate. Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum can be very useful legal source to show that great transformation. At the classical period, the Law was an entirely different institution than its
original predecessor. The Lex Cornelia in the writings by Ulpianus or Paulus is already certainly ‘a law on killing’, although jurists, being typically attached to tradition, attempt ‘to change as much
as possible by changing as little as possible’. This practice – quite easy to recognise – probably best shows the face of Sulla’s Law as known from Collatio legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum. The words hominem occiderit – if they appeared in the original Sulla’s Law at all – were used by classical jurists as a basis for the widening interpretation and, consequently, a reconstruction of the Law towards the common law on homicide. It must have been as a result of a rather long-lasting process of law-making interpretation of law by legislative factors of the Principate.