The sources of Dissertations on Early Law and Custom

1. Henry Sumner Maine 2 authority · 4 extended 6 citations · 7 passages

   preface. · ch. 2 2 passages anchored here · ch. 5 · ch. 9 2 passages anchored here · ch. 12

   Named directly and quoted from by page reference as the Author's own earlier work.

   Some years ago, on my return from India, I stated in a book on ‘Village Communities in the East and West’ (pp.

2. Manu 4 authority · 2 neutral 6 citations · 11 passages

   ch. 3 3 passages anchored here · ch. 4 2 passages anchored here · ch. 5 4 passages anchored here · ch. 7 · ch. 12

   The most extensively cited law-book, treated as the principal authority discussed at length.

   161) that ‘such advantage as a man would gain who should attempt to pass deep water in a boat made of woven reeds, that father obtains who passes the gloom of death leaving only contemptible sons.

3. Twelve Tables of Rome Roman decemvirs (traditional) 3 authority · 2 neutral 5 citations · 8 passages

   ch. 2 2 passages anchored here · ch. 4 · ch. 5 2 passages anchored here · ch. 11 · ch. 12 2 passages anchored here

   The Roman law-code is directly named and its content characterized.

   Yet the meagre extant fragments of the Twelve Tables of Rome contain rules which are plainly religious or ritualistic:

4. Ancient Law Henry Sumner Maine 2 authority · 2 extended 4 citations · 9 passages

   ch. 3 · ch. 5 2 passages anchored here · ch. 8 4 passages anchored here · ch. 12 2 passages anchored here

   The author explicitly cites and revises his own earlier published analysis.

   The Roman law, as a working system, takes a view of Family and Kinship not very different from that accepted in modern societies, but we happen to have unusual facilities for ascertaining a very ancient condition of this law, and it is not possible to doubt that, when the law was in this state, the Family and the Kinship of which it took cognisance had for their basis the authority of the eldest male ascendant.

5. Hindu Law and Usage J. D. Mayne 3 authority · 1 endorsed 4 citations · 7 passages

   ch. 4 · ch. 5 5 passages anchored here · ch. 12

   Named modern legal work cited as authority for a specific legal-historical finding.

   ‘Heirs in the female line frequently take before very near Sapindas in the direct male line’ (‘Hindu Law and Usage,’ p.

6. La Cité Antique Fustel de Coulanges 1 extended · 2 endorsed 3 citations · 5 passages

   ch. 4 3 passages anchored here · ch. 5 · ch. 12

   Named work whose thesis is both relied upon and partly contested across three paragraphs.

   Fustel de Coulanges was the first modern writer to bring into full light, in his brilliant book ‘La Cité Antique,’ the hitherto little observed importance of the private or family worship of the Greeks and Romans.

7. Deuteronomy unnamed biblical author 1 authority · 1 neutral 2 citations

   ch. 4 · ch. 5

   Explicitly quoted scriptural verse used as evidence of a prohibition.

   I have brought away the hallowed things out of my house .

8. Homer 1 authority · 1 neutral 2 citations · 3 passages

   ch. 7 · ch. 8 2 passages anchored here

   The poems attributed to Homer are cited as evidence for the character of the early Greek King's judicial role.

   Aristotle and the writers who have followed him suppose that the larger groups of men discernible in the twilight of history have somehow grown out of isolated families like that of the Homeric Cyclops.

9. Roman law Roman legal tradition 1 authority · 1 neutral 2 citations · 4 passages

   ch. 8 · ch. 9 3 passages anchored here

   Roman law is invoked directly and used to fix the author's argument about exogamy and endogamy.

   The Roman law, which supplies the only sure route by which the mind can travel back without a check from civilisation to barbarism, shows us society organised in separate families, each ruled by the Paterfamilias, its despotic chief.

10. Ajax Sophocles 1 neutral 1 citation

    ch. 12

    Explicitly cited by line reference.

    There is a startling contrast between the last prayer of Ajax to Zeus that he be at least buried, so that dogs and birds eat not his body, and the prayer of the devout Zoroastrian that he be not buried, and that dogs and birds do eat his remains.

11. Alexis de Tocqueville 1 extended 1 citation

    ch. 10

    De Tocqueville's suggestion is explicitly cited and treated as a starting point others will extend.

    De Tocqueville has strongly suggested, and others after him will probably demonstrate, that the enormous social prestige of the French Court and its constant indulgence of its military tastes had at length turned the French territorial nobility into a caste as distinct from the cultivating peasantry as is the Rajput from the Sudra, as distinct as was the white planter of the Southern States from t …

12. Ancient Society Mr. Lewis Morgan 1 neutral 1 citation

    ch. 9

    Ancient Society is named alongside Primitive Marriage as a source of researches into savage kinship groups.

    Lewis Morgan (in his ‘Ancient Society’), is a point upon which it may one day be possible to have a clearer opinion when the savage and the Aryan group have been fully studied in the life.

13. Aristotle 1 neutral 1 citation

    ch. 8

    Mentioned as a lost treatise relevant to Aristotle's authority, without being drawn upon directly.

    And he left a special treatise on ‘Barbarian Customs’ (νόμιμα βαρβαρικὰ), now unfortunately lost.

14. Arthur Young 1 authority 1 citation

    ch. 10

    Young's observations are explicitly cited to correct a supposed popular error about French land.

    immediately before it, Arthur Young, one of the most observant of English travellers, expresses himself as amazed at their multitude.

15. Book of Judges unknown (Hebrew Scripture) 1 authority 1 citation

    ch. 7

    The Book of Judges is named explicitly as the scriptural source for the account of the Hebrew Judges.

    The exploits told of them in the Scriptural Book of Judges point to them chiefly as heroes raised up at moments of national disaster;

16. Book of Ruth unknown/traditional 1 neutral 1 citation · 2 passages

    ch. 5 2 passages anchored here

    The Book of Ruth is cited neutrally as a narrative illustration of the levirate procedure and its legal implications.

    Let me repeat that, in most of the Athenian rules about the rights and duties of the nearest kinsman, we have illustrations of the tendency, manifest also in the last chapter of the Book of Ruth, of ancient contrivances for continuing the family to become mere modes of succession to property.

17. Charles Darwin 1 endorsed 1 citation · 2 passages

    ch. 8 2 passages anchored here

    Extensively quoted and explicitly endorsed as corroborating the Patriarchal theory.

    Darwin appears to me to have been conducted by his own observations and studies to a view of the primitive condition of mankind, which cannot be distinguished from this theory.

18. Diodorus Siculus 1 neutral 1 citation

    ch. 12

    Explicitly cited and its content characterized as probably spurious.

    14 (commenting on a probably spurious law attributed to Charondas).

19. Eumenides Aeschylus 1 extended 1 citation

    ch. 12

    Explicitly discussed and interpreted at length in the paragraph.

    This passage is parallel to a better known passage in the Eumenides of Æschylus, in which Apollo, as advocate for Orestes, argues that he was not of kin to his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he had killed.

20. Euripides 1 neutral 1 citation

    ch. 12

    Explicitly cited with anthology reference.

    Euripides, Frag.

21. Gaius 1 authority 1 citation

    ch. 8

    Explicitly credited with enabling division of Roman law into successive strata supporting the theory.

    Its revival may be said to be owing to Niebuhr’s discovery of the ‘Commentaries of Gaius,’ which, though not directly treating of ancient Roman law, enabled us to divide it into successive stages or strata, and gave us a singularly complete view of the earliest among them.

22. Gospel of Matthew 1 neutral 1 citation

    ch. 5

    The Gospel is cited neutrally as the textual source of the reported Sadducee question.

    The Levirate, under which the son is born to the dead man from his brother, ‘that his name be not put out of Israel,’ is best known to Englishmen from the casuistical question of the Sadducees in the twenty-second chapter of St.

23. Herbert Spencer 1 extended 1 citation

    ch. 4

    Named work quoted to extend the classification of ancestor-worshipping societies.

    In harmony with this theory, the various societies of mankind, in their relation to belief in a spirit world, have been thus classed by Mr.

24. Hippocrates 1 neutral 1 citation

    ch. 8

    Named as the treatise in which Hippocrates argued against a prevailing doctrine, reported neutrally by Maine.

    Euripides distinctly states that in his day the universal physiological doctrine was that the child descended exclusively from the male parent, and Hippocrates (περὶ παιδίου), in energetically combating this opinion, and contending that the child descended from both parents, seems to admit that it was a prevalent heresy.

156 sources are named once. Each stands in the run of its own chapter, below — in the order of the text.