NEXUM

was either the transfer of the ownership of a thing, or the transfer of a thing to a creditor as a security; accordingly in one sense Nexum included Mancipium [ Mancipium ]; in another sense, Mancipium and Nexum are opposed in the same way in which Sale and Mortgage or Pledge are opposed. The formal part of both transactions consisted in a transfer per aes et libram . The person who became nexus by the effect of a nexum or nexus (for this form of the word also is used) was said nexum inire . The phrases nexi datio , nexi liberatio , respectively expre the contracting and the release from the obligation. The Roman law as to the payment of borrowed money was very strict. By a law of the Twelve Tables, if the debtor admitted the debt, or had been condemned in the amount of the debt by a judex, he had thirty days allowed him for payment. At the expiration of this time, he was liable to be a igned over to the creditor ( addict us ) by the sentence of the praetor. The creditor was required to keep him for sixty days in chains, during which time he publicly exposed the debtor on three nundinae, and proclaimed the amount of his debt. If no person released the prisoner by paying the debt, the creditor might sell him as a slave or put him to death. If there were several creditors, the letter of the law allowed them to cut the debtor in pieces, and to take their share of his body in proportion to their debt. There is no instance of a creditor ever having adopted this extreme mode of satisfying his debt. But the creditor might treat the debtor, who was addict us, as a slave, and compel him to work out his debt; and the treatment was often very severe. The Lex Poetilia ( B.C. 326) alleviated the condition of the nexi. So far as we can understand its provisions, it set all the nexi free, or made them soluti , and it enacted that for the future there should be no nexum, and that no debtor should for the future be put in chains.