Definition
In Roman law, to restore a former law or practice; to vote against or reject a proposed new law in favor of retaining existing law. The term captures both the act of legislative rejection and the underlying preference for established legal tradition over innovation.
When Roman citizens voted on proposed legislation, those who opposed the measure indicated their vote by marking their ballot with the letter "A," the initial of the Latin word antiquo — meaning "I am for the old law." The act of marking that ballot, and the legislative outcome it contributed to, was described as antiquare.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of Roman law with no surviving operational presence in modern common law or civil law practice. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical legal texts, particularly those engaged with Roman legislative procedure or the reception of Roman law concepts into early modern European jurisprudence.
The term appears in glossaries and law dictionaries primarily as a vocabulary entry for students of Roman law, not as a concept with live doctrinal application. When encountered in a historical source, it signals a discussion of the Roman comitial voting process — the assemblies through which Roman citizens voted on leges (statutes) proposed by magistrates.
The bibliographic trail is narrow. All four historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus trace the definition to a single source: Calvin (Calvinus), referring to Johannes Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum, a standard reference work for Latin legal terminology first published in the early seventeenth century. Researchers should note that the convergence across Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's on identical language almost certainly reflects shared derivation from Calvinus rather than independent analysis. The entries are essentially translational glosses, not independent legal commentaries.
There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation to track, no common law parallel, and no modern statutory or regulatory analog. The term's research value is primarily philological and historical: understanding what antiquare meant illuminates how Roman legislative assemblies expressed institutional conservatism, and how that conservatism was encoded in a physical voting ritual.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four historical dictionary entries are in close agreement — nearly verbatim agreement — which itself is informative. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's reproduce the same core definition with only minor word-level variation (Bouvier's writes "resolve" where others write "restore," which appears to be a typographical or editorial deviation rather than a substantive distinction). All four credit Calvin (Calvinus) as the source.
Burrill's is marginally the most scholarly of the four entries, noting the Latin root explicitly (from antiquus, meaning ancient or old) and italicizing the source reference in a manner consistent with his more careful citation practice generally. None of the entries expand beyond the definition into Roman procedural context — none explain, for instance, the distinction between the comitia centuriata and comitia tributa, the assemblies in which such voting occurred, or how the antiquare vote related to the broader Roman legislative process. Researchers seeking that context will need to go beyond the dictionary corpus to works on Roman public law.
What the historical dictionaries miss: none of the entries situate antiquare within the full spectrum of Roman voting abbreviations. Roman ballots also carried "V.R." (uti rogas — "as you propose," indicating a vote in favor) alongside "A" (antiquo). Understanding the full ballot system gives antiquare its proper meaning as one pole of a formal binary choice, not merely a general preference for tradition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Roman Law; Legislative History and Interpretation.