Definition
A document in Roman law consisting of a transcript or counterpart of an apocha — the receipt given by a creditor acknowledging payment of a debt — signed by the debtor and delivered to the creditor. Where the apocha ran from creditor to debtor (confirming the creditor had received payment), the antapocha ran the other direction: it was the debtor's signed acknowledgment, handed to the creditor, completing the documentary exchange. Together, the two instruments created a bilateral written record of the debt's satisfaction.
Common Confusion
Antapocha is easily confused with apocha, and the two terms form a matched pair that researchers must read together. The apocha is the creditor's receipt — signed by the creditor, held by the debtor as proof of payment. The antapocha is the debtor's counterpart — signed by the debtor, held by the creditor. Mixing up which party signed which instrument, or which party retained which document, will invert the legal significance of both. See APOCHA in this dictionary.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources treating Roman civil law or its reception into early European legal systems. Researchers are unlikely to encounter antapocha in common law sources, and its absence from most English-language legal dictionaries after the nineteenth century reflects its narrow scope. When it does appear — in treatises on Roman law, canon law debt instruments, or comparative legal history — the term is meaningful only in relation to apocha. A source that mentions antapocha without apocha has almost certainly truncated the analysis.
The paired structure of apocha and antapocha reflects a Roman law convention of bilateral documentary confirmation: neither party held only a unilateral acknowledgment. Researchers working on the history of receipt instruments, debt satisfaction, or the documentary practices of Roman and Romano-canonical procedure should treat the two terms as a unit. The concept anticipates modern counterpart execution of contracts, where each party signs and retains an identical copy, though the Roman mechanism assigned distinct instruments to each party rather than identical copies.
No modern common law jurisdiction preserves antapocha as an operative legal term. Its research value is historical and comparative.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement, differing mainly in depth. Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most complete entry, identifying the Greek-Latin construction (from anti, "against," and apocha), specifying that the debtor signs and the creditor receives, and citing Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum alongside the Codex Justinianus (Cod. 4.21.19). Black's first and second editions track the same substance but strip the etymological framing and compress the Calvinus citation to "Calvin." without full reference. None of the three sources offer examples of antapocha in practice or discuss its relationship to broader Roman debt documentation beyond the cross-reference to apocha. Researchers should consult Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum directly for the primary civilian authority, as none of the English dictionaries carry the analysis further than the bare definition.