or possession is held by several persons jointly according to a kind of partnership or mutual agreement from which all other persons are excluded. Poverty of language compels the use of the same words for things that are not the same. And so because of a certain similarity and likeness, our modern nomenclature is applied to that state of primitive law. Now, in ancient times, ‘common’ meant simply the opposite of ‘particular’; and ‘sovereignty’ or ‘ownership’, meant the privilege of lawfully using common property. This seemed to the Scholastics[45] to be a use in fact but not in law, because what now in law is called use, is a particular right, or if I may use their phraseology, is, in respect to other persons, a privative right.

In the primitive law of nations, which is sometimes called Natural Law, and which the poets sometimes portray as having existed in a Golden Age, and sometimes in the reign of Saturn or of Justice, there was no particular right. As Cicero says: ‘But nothing is by nature private property’. And Horace:[46] ‘For nature has decreed to be the master of private soil neither him, nor me, nor anyone else’. For nature knows no sovereigns. Therefore in this sense we say that in those ancient times all things were held in common, meaning what the poets do when they say that primitive men acquired everything in common, and that Justice maintained a community of goods by means of an inviolable compact. And to make this clearer, they say that in those primitive times the fields were not delimited by boundary lines, and that there was no commercial intercourse. [As Avienus says]:[47] ‘The promiscuity of the fields had made everything seem common to all’.

The word ‘seemed’ is rightly added, owing to the changed meaning of the words, as we have noted above.