up intending to buy a bottle of beer which explodes and blinds you, if the label warns you of danger? Is the store liable for injury caused by another customer whom its employees have allowed to enter? Is it liable for the act of an assistant who had been carefully selected and trained? There will (usually) be answers to these questions, but that is not my point. For me the issue is that we go about our business without much thinking about the law that is nonetheless authoritative. Again, law is everywhere, and I have long been fascinated by the extent to which scholars in other disciplines fail to do justice to their own subjects by ignoring or misunderstanding law.8 An interesting example occurs in volume one of the distinguishedReligions of Rome by Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price.9 They write: “The precise and apparently legalistic formulae of this and other vows has often given the impression that Roman vows were ‘contractual’ in the sense that the gods were seen as laid under an obligation by the mere fact of the taking of the vow. Whatever the individual worshiper may have hoped, in this case (and in general) that is not what the words state or imply.” But , indeed, the vow is extremely legalistic, and has an analogue in the early formal private law contract of stipulatio. The contract is unilateral, only the promissor being bound, but the contract may be made under a condition. Thus: “Do you promise that if I give youasses, you will deliver to me the slave Stichus, that I will have control over him, and that he is free from hidden defects?” “ I promise.” The promissee is not bound to giveasses, but if he does, the promissor is under an obligation to deliver Stichus on the stated terms. Likewise in the vow. The gods are under no obligation to perform, but if they do, the promissor - the Roman people - is under the 8 See, e.g. Alan Watson, Ancient Law and Modern Understanding(Athens, GA., 1998), pp. 34 ff. 9 (Cambridge, 1998), at p. 34.
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