1Though it could have been done very neatly like this: 'The Sabine farm is mine.' 1'No, mine,' and then the trial — they would not have it. 1'The farm,' he says, 'which is in the territory which is called Sabine.' 1Verbose enough; 1tell me, what next? 1'That I declare to be mine by the law of the Quirites.' 1What then? 1'From there I summon you thither to join hands in lawful contest.' 1The man from whom the claim was being made had no idea what to answer this so long-windedly litigious man. 1The same jurisconsult crosses over, like a Latin piper. 1'Whence you summoned me to join hands in lawful contest,' he says, 'thence I summon you back thither.' 1Meanwhile, so that the praetor should not think himself fine and fortunate and say something on his own initiative, a formula was composed for him too, absurd in other respects, but above all in this: 'The witnesses of both parties being present, I declare that to be the way; 1go on your way.' 1That wise man was on hand to teach them how to go on their way.
1'Return on your way.' 1Under the same guide they came back. 1Even then, I imagine, this seemed ridiculous to those bearded men of old: that men, when they had taken their stand properly and in the right place, should be ordered to go away, so that they should return at once to the very place from which they had gone. 1With the same absurdities all those other phrases are coloured: 'Whereas I see you in court', and this: 'Will you state on what ground you have laid claim?' 1While these things were secret, they had of necessity to be sought from those who held them; 1but afterwards, once they were made public and tossed about and shaken out in people's hands, they were found utterly empty of wisdom but packed with fraud and folly.
27For although very many things had been admirably established by the laws, most of them have been corrupted and perverted by the ingenuity of jurisconsults. 27Our ancestors wished all women, because of their weakness of judgement, to be in the power of guardians; 27these men invented kinds of guardians who would be held in the power of the women. 27They did not wish family rites to die out; 27by the ingenuity of these men old men were found to make fictitious marriages in order to extinguish the rites. 27In short, in the whole of civil law they abandoned equity and clung to the mere words, so that, because they had found that name used as an example in someone's books, they thought that all women who made a fictitious marriage were called 'Gaia'.
27Now it always seems astonishing to me, at least, that so many men, so clever, after so many years still cannot decide whether one ought to say 'the third day' or 'the day after tomorrow', 'judge' or 'arbiter', 'case' or 'suit'.