INTERDICTIO AQUA ET IGNI. - A Roman capital penalty, inflicted, from the last century of the Republic onward, by the tribunals called quaestiones perpetuae.

Its origin is to be seen in the faculty that the accused of a crime entailing a death sentence had of escaping its application by going into exile. From this to considering the i. a. et i. not as a substitute for the penalty but as a true and proper penalty, the step was short (Cicero, Paradoxa, 4, 31); it is held that it was prescribed as such for the first time by the penal laws of Caesar the dictator. The name derives from the interdiction of roof, water and fire pronounced with a particular formula (Cicero, De domo sua, 78). The i. a. et i., besides the prohibition of residing in Italy, produced as consequences the loss of citizenship and the publicatio bonorum (total confiscation of the patrimony). It declined with the end of the procedure of the quaestiones and with the substitution for it of extraordinary repression.

Bibliography4 works

BIBL.: E. Levy, Römische Kapitalstrafe, Heidelberg 1931, passim: U. Brasiello, La repressione penale in diritto romano, Napoli 1937, p. 97 ff.; C. Gioffredi, L'aqua et igni interdictio e il concorso privato alla repressione penale, in Archivio penale, 1947, p. 426 ff.; id., Ancora su l'aqua et igni interdictio, in Studia et documenta historiae et iuris, 1946 (but 1947), p. 191 ff.; V. Arangio-Ruiz, Storia del diritto romano, 6th ed., Napoli 1950, p. 177.

Rodolfo Danieli

@incollection{ec7_interdictio_aqua_et_igni, author = {Danieli, Rodolfo}, title = {Interdictio Aqua Et Igni}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {VII}, pages = {80--81}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1951}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/interdictio-aqua-et-igni} }

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