Appendix 3. (745).
We need to bear in mind that the purpose of civil laws was to sanction only a part, never the whole of rational Right. And this part did not, properly speaking, concern individuals but families and their preservation and development. This enables us to understand in their true spirit the many laws of different peoples which seem absurd and barbaric simply because we claim to find in them what the legislators did not intend, that is, the whole of rational Right rather than just that part of it which they intended for the purpose of their legislation. As I have said, legislators did not concern themselves so much with individuals as with the good of families or, more generally, with the human family. Consequently they valued individual rights not for what they are in themselves but for what they are relative to the good of entire generations. Clear proof of this will be given, I think, by an example taken from the laws with which some ancient peoples defended human life and an imal life the ox, for example, which was useful for family prosperity.
It would be a great injustice to think that the first legislators did not know that human life in itself was more valuable than the life of an ox; nevertheless, in their laws they sometimes showed that the latter had equal, if not more value than the former. They formed their laws, I repeat, to defend not the absolute value of rights but the relative value of the good of entire families, together with other social and humanitarian purposes. Varro writes as follows about the protection given by ancient laws to the ox, or rather to human society which was greatly helped by the ox: `This (ox) is the friend of human beings, working in the fields and at the crops. Ancient people had such a desire to free themselves from this kind of work that anyone who killed an ox was punished by death. Attica and Pelopenesus testify to this' (De re rustica, 2, 5). Columella also says: `Ancient peoples venerated the ox so much that capital punishment applied equally for killing an ox as for kil ling a citizen' (Bk. 6, in proem.). Hence the ox was respected as something sacred because of its great usefulness. Pausanias relates that on one occasion when the Athenians were sacrificing an ox to Jupiter, the priest had to flee to avoid being killed (In Attic.). Herodotus also narrates many things done by the Egyptians to honour a dead ox (In Euterp.). Cf. also Arist. Polit., 1, 1; Plin., 8, 45; Val. Max., 8, 1; Aelian., Historiae animalium, 12, 34; Stobeus, Serm., 42; Porphyr., De non edendis animalibus; Plut., De esu animalium. All these places indicate that laws, religion and philosophy concerned the utility of human society rather than simple right, that is, simple individual justice.