Definition
In Roman civil law, an expilator is a robber, spoiler, or plunderer — specifically one who takes property by open force or violent seizure, as distinguished from a common thief who acts by stealth. The term derives from Roman legal usage and appears in the Digest in the context of crimes against property. The Digest draws a pointed distinction between expilators and ordinary thieves: expilators were considered more atrocious offenders precisely because their taking was open and violent rather than covert.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who plunders or pillages.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who pillages; a plunderer; a pillager. [Obs.] — Sir T. Browne.
The common and legal meanings are closely aligned in that both describe a plunderer. The legal term, however, carries a technical Roman law distinction: an expilator is not simply any violent taker, but a category of offender treated as more culpable than a fur (thief) because the taking was open rather than clandestine. The common usage has no awareness of this gradation.
Common Confusion
EXPILATOR vs. FUR: In Roman law, fur denoted a thief who acted secretly; expilator denoted one who seized property openly and by force. The maxim preserved in the Digest — expilátores sunt atrociores fures ("expilators are more atrocious than thieves") — directly encodes this hierarchy. Researchers encountering either term in civil law texts or commentary should not treat them as synonyms. The distinction carries real consequences for how Roman jurists categorized offenses and assigned remedies.
Why It Matters in Research
EXPILATOR is an essentially dead term in modern Anglo-American legal writing. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in three contexts: (1) translations of or commentary on Roman law sources, particularly the Digest (Corpus Juris Civilis); (2) historical English common law treatises that drew on civil law analogies; and (3) early American legal dictionaries that populated their pages with Latin civil law vocabulary as a matter of scholarly convention. A corpus researcher who encounters expilator in a 19th-century American legal text should treat it as a signal that the author is drawing on civilian tradition, not domestic common law.
The maxim quoted in both Burrill and Black's 2nd — expilátores sunt atrociores fures, Dig. 47, 18, 1, 1 — is the anchor citation. Researchers tracing this phrase should note that Digest 47.18 concerns the crimen expilatarum hereditatum (plundering of inheritances), a specific Roman law offense that gave the term much of its practical context in Roman jurisprudence. The word's appearance outside that inheritance-plundering context in later legal texts may indicate loose or analogical usage rather than strict technical application.
Do not expect jurisdictional variation to be meaningful here. No common law jurisdiction adopted expilator as a term of art in domestic statutes or reported case law. Its presence in legal writing is uniformly doctrinal or historical.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in near-complete agreement. Burrill's entry is the most complete, supplying both the Latin maxim and its Digest citation verbatim; Black's 2nd reproduces this faithfully (with a minor orthographic variant — "Ezpilatores" — almost certainly a typesetting error for "Expilátores"). Black's 1st is truncated in the available excerpt but follows the same pattern. No meaningful divergence exists across these sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context for how the term functioned within Roman law's broader taxonomy of property crimes. A researcher relying solely on these dictionary entries would know that expilators were worse than thieves but would not know why — the answer lies in the civilian distinction between clandestine and open taking, and in the special action available for plundering inheritances. For that context, the dictionaries must be supplemented with civilian sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Roman Law — Property Offenses; Theft and Robbery in the Common Law Tradition.