Lex Papiria
Lex Papiria DE SACRAMENTO, a plebiscitum of L. Papirius, providing that the tres viri capitales should be elected by the people, and should exact from unsuccessful litigants the stake (sacramentum) which they lost in the legis actio of that name, and which was forfeited to the aerarium (Festus, s. v. Sacramento: cf. Mommsen, Röm. Staatsrecht, ii. pp. 580, 585). Puchta (Institutionen, § 161, note g) conjectures that the statute also put an end to the actual deposit of the stake in sacro, and substituted the giving of security (praedes) for its payment.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.