Those who seek to understand the past are drawn to origins, sometimes dangerously so. This infatuation with the "beginning" responds first and foremost to a desire for order, precisely because historiography is a narrative, which needs a point of departure and a point of arrival, but also to the almost futile desire to capture a phenomenon in its initial, pure state.
What, then, is the oldest surviving testimony toaequitas, Latin equity? It's not a legal or literary text, but an object, a cup - a poculum - dedicated around 280 BC to Aecetia, i.e. (if we accept this hypothesis) an archaic form ofAequitas, understood as a personification, like a divinity (probably presiding over measures and weights), which we imagine drinking from this cup.
Legal inscriptions from the 2ndcentury BC, such as the senatus-consults of Bacchanalibus, Tiburtibus, Magnetum and Prienensium litibus, and the Sententia Minuciorum, confirm the role of the notion ofaequum in Roman thought, as a key term in legal reasoning. Comedies and tragedies confirmed the concept's diffusion among the public (Plautus, Stichus, 726; Terence, The Brothers, 796-804, The Hecyre, 840). But was it a principle in opposition to law, as is often claimed? Powerful verses by Ennius (La Rançon d'Hector, fr. 155-6 J. ; 188-9 V.) give us the answer: Melius est virtute ius: nam saepe virtutem mali / nanciscuntur: ius atque aecum se a malis spernit procul ("Right is better than bravery. For the wicked often attain bravery, but the righteous and the just keep far from the wicked"). No opposition, but a convergence between right (ius) and equity (aequum), at least when it comes to "good right".
