ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS Fifty points total. Please select one of the following six prompts. Please writ a succinct, comprehensive legal-historical analysis of your chosen passage. Please writ about 250-300 wors. Besides the analysis, please include: an identification of the larger work from which the excerpt is drawn (for example: "Laws of Ur-Nammu" or simply "LU"); a rough or relative date for that work, and where it was produced (for example: "Early Dynastic Sumer" or "one of the latest Sumerian law collections" or "in classical Greece during the fifth century BCE"). Please use specific examples to illustrate your assertions and above all think critically

1. "These actions....followed the words of the law, and therefore, like the law itself, were observed without any alteration. Hence, it was decided that a person who brought an action against another for cutting his vines, and in the pleadings called them 'vines,' should lose his case, because he ought to have called them 'trees,' because the XIITables, under which the action for cutting vines was brought, speaks...of the cutting of trees"

2. "It is proper that the power of masters over their slaves should remain unimpaired, and that no man should be deprived of his right; but it is to the interest of the masters themselves that relief from cruelty, hunger, or intolerable injury, should not be denied to those who justly implore it. Therefore, take note of the complaints of those slaves of Julius Sabinus who fled for refuge to the Imperial statue; and if you find that they have been treated with greater severity than was proper, or subjected to disgraceful outrage, order them to be sold, under such conditions that they may not be restored to the power of their master; and if he violates this, let him know that he will be more severely punished"

3. "Women are placed in the hand of their husbands by confarreatio, through a kind of sacrifice made to Jupiter Farreus, in which a loaf is used, whence the ceremony gets its name. Besides this, to perform the ceremony, many other things are done and take place, accompanied with certain solemn words, in the presence of ten witnesses. This law is still in force in our time, for the principalflamines, that is to say, those of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, as well as the chief of the sacred rites, are exclusively selected from persons born of marriages celebrated byconfarreatio. Nor can these persons themselves serve as priests without marriage byconfarreatio"

4. "In my sixth and seventh consulships, (28-27 BCE) when I had extinguished the flames of civil war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the Senate and the Roman people....After that time I took precedence of all in auctoritas, but of power (potestas) Ipossessed no more than those who were my colleagues in any magistracy"

5. "If any woman should commit adultery, it must be inquired whether she was the mistress of a tavern or a servant girl and thus in the performance of her servile duty she herself frequently served the wines of intemperance....chastity is required only of those women who are held by the bonds of law, but those who, because of their low status in life are not deemed worthy of the consideration of the laws, shall be immune from judicial severity"

6. "Under the Cornelian Law, the degree of [culpability] depends upon the act, but by this law gross negligence is not considered [culpability]. Therefore, if anyone precipitates himself from a height and falls upon another and kills him, or if a man trimming trees throws down a branch and does not give warning, but kills a passerby, he will not be liable to punishment under this law"

7. "Yet [this] proposal seems to me, I wouldn't say cruel (for what could be cruel in the case of such men?), but foreign to the customs of our country....But, you may say, who will complain of a decree which is passed against traitors to their country? Time, I answer, the lapse of years, and Fortune, whose caprice rules the nations....All bad precedents have originated in cases which were good; but when the control of the government falls into the hands of men who are incompetent or bad, your new precedent is transferred from those who deserve such punishment to the undeserving and blameless"

8. "Wherefore, if it is the part of a virtuous consul when he sees all the bulwarks of the republic undermined and weakened, to come to the assistance of his country; to bring help to the safety and fortunes of all men; to implore the good faith of the citizens; to think his own safety of secondary consideration when put in competition with the common safety of all; it is the part also of virtuous and fearless citizens, such as you have shown yourself in all the emergencies of the republic, to block up all the avenues for sedition, to fortify the bulwarks of the state, to think that the supreme power is vested in the consuls, the supreme wisdom in the senate; and to judge the man who acts in obedience to them, worthy of praise and honor, rather than of condemnation and punishment"