Aulus Gellius

These proceedings are known to us by the statements of Aulus Gellius, who has given us the very terms of the Twelve Tables, 20, 1.

Aulus Gellius gives a fragment of Sabinus which combines the first and third definition of furtum manifestum.

Ea quoque furta quae per lancem liciumque concepta essent, proinde ac si manifesta forent, vindicaverunt, Gellius, 11, 18, 9.

” On this subject there is a remarkable passage in Aulus Gellius, “When a Gladiator prepares to enter the lists for combat, such is his lot that he must either kill his adversary, or be killed himself.

Hence may be solved the question to be found in Gellius, respecting a commission, whether it can be fulfilled by doing, not the immediate act required, but some thing equivalent to it, or in a manner more beneficial than in the form prescribed.

This seems the most proper place for reviewing those distinctions in the motives of punishment, which have been used by Plato in his Gorgias, and by Taurus the philosopher in a passage quoted by Gellius in the fourteenth chapter of his fifth book.

And so Marcus Cicero, in the book which he wrote on fate, when he said that this question was most obscure and most entangled, declares that the philosopher Chrysippus too did not extricate himself in it, in these words: