CHAPTER VI. The Gold Unit everywhere the value of a Cow.

penalty.” To the same law Dionysius of Halicarnassus refers¹⁶: “They ratified a law in the Centuriate Assembly in order that all the magistrates might have the power of inflicting punishment on those who were disorderly or acted illegally in reference to their own jurisdiction. For till then not all the magistrates had the power, but only the Consuls. But they did not leave the penalty in their own hands to fix as much as they pleased, but they themselves defined the amount, having appointed as a maximum limit of penalty two oxen and thirty sheep. And this law continued to be kept in force by the Romans for a long time.” Festus (s.v. Peculatus p. 237 ed. Müller) says: “Peculation (peculatus), as a name for public theft, was derived from pecus ‘cattle,’ because that was the earliest kind of fraud, and before the coining of copper or silver the heaviest penalty for crimes was one of two sheep and thirty oxen. That law was enacted by the Consuls T. Menenius Lanatus and P. Sestius Capitolinus. As regards which cattle, after the Roman people began to use coined money, it was provided by the Tarpeian Law that an ox should be reckoned at 100 asses, a sheep at 10 asses.”