The limits of the notion of "corrumpere"

Even within the wide notion of "corrumpere", however, certain additional limitations were inherent. First, it required that the object involved had to have deteriorated.

"... nam alia quaedam species damni est ipsum quid corrumpere et mutare, ut lex Aquilia locum habcat, alia nulla ipsius mutationc applicare aliud, cuius molesta separatio sit."^[5124]

But this seems to have been a borderline case, for Ulpian came down (though somewhat haltingly)^[5125] in favour of the actio legis Aquiliae in the rather similar situation that grain had been mixed up with sand.^[5126] Closely related was (thirdly) a whole group of situations where the owner was deprived of a specific item of his property but where this piece of property was neither destroyed nor damaged (nor, inciden­tally, appropriated by the offender to his own use).^[5127] Two friends take a stroll along the banks of the Tiber; one of them, while admiring the other's ring, inadvertently drops it into the river.^[5128] A person knocks some coins out of somebody else's hand, so that they roll into the sea or down a drain.^[5129] A boar that has been trapped in A's boar trap is released by B and thus regains its natural liberty.^[5130] Or take another variation of the pannum rubrum case: somebody waves a red flag, but this time the startled cattle do not fall over a precipice but merely stampede, and are not seen again.^[5131] In all these cases, an actio furti does not lie.^[5132] Nor can the ring, the coins, the boar or the cattle be said to be "corrupted". Yet, the owner has undoubtedly incurred a loss, but it is damnum sine laesione corporis.

Finally there was the issue of "other men's meat":^[5135] cases where one person inflicted loss upon another by putting some item of his wealth precisely to its proper use: eating other people's food, drinking their wine, using their incense, or trampling their grapes to make wine. "Si quis alienum vinum vel frumentum consumpserit, non videtur damnum iniuria dare ideoque utilis danda est actio", says Paul,^[5136] and in these instances it can scarcely have been the lack of laesio corporis that made him reject the possibility of Aquilian liability: the food is chewed up and swallowed, the grapes burst under the offender's feet, etc. It is not clear, however, whether destruction in the course of proper user was nevertheless taken not to constitute "corruption" in terms of chapter three,^{[5137] [5138] [5139] or whether, as Birks has suggested,"48 the issue turned around the "iniuria" requirement: (cor-)ruptiones, which are in harmony with the natural order of things do not amount to (cor-)rumpere iniuria.}

V.