Definition
Pegora is a Latin term from Roman law referring to cattle or beasts, specifically quadrupeds that fed or grazed in flocks or herds. The term functioned as a collective noun for livestock of the grazing variety and carried legal significance in Roman property law, particularly in the context of legacies, usufructs, and the legal treatment of herds as composite or collective things.
Common Confusion
Pegora and pecora (or pecus) are easily conflated in both transcription and translation. Pecus/pecora is the more common classical Latin term for cattle or livestock broadly, while pegora appears in Digest usage with the specific collective and flock-feeding connotation. In manuscript sources and early printed editions of the Digest, variant spellings may obscure which term is intended. Researchers should verify the source text rather than treating the two as interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering pegora in Roman law texts, civil law treatises, or early common law materials rooted in the civilian tradition should treat it as a term of art with a defined scope. The Digest reference (Dig. 32, 65, 4) places pegora squarely in the law of legacies — specifically the rules governing what passes when a testator bequeaths a herd or flock. This matters because Roman law drew careful distinctions between individual animals and the collective entity of a herd; a legacy of pegora could carry with it questions about which animals were included, whether replacements or offspring fell within the bequest, and how the herd was to be valued.
Researchers working in civilian jurisdictions or consulting civil law sources as persuasive authority should note that the collective treatment of grazing animals as a legal unit has downstream influence on how later civilian systems handled agricultural property and usufruct of flocks. When scanning historical indices or digests, pegora may appear without translation or gloss in Latin-language legal texts, and its scope — quadrupeds grazing in flocks — should not be assumed to extend to all livestock indiscriminately.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the sole dictionary entry for this term in the Law Mind corpus, defining pegora as cattle or beasts and specifically noting the limitation to quadrupeds that fed in flocks, with citation to Dig. 32, 65, 4. The entry is spare but accurate in its reference. The Digest passage itself concerns the scope of legacies involving herds, and the collective character of the term is the key legal point.
Historical legal dictionaries generally offer little elaboration on pegora beyond the Latin gloss, reflecting the term's status as a technical Roman law term unlikely to appear in common law pleading or statute. Researchers should be aware that broader Latin dictionaries may define pecus or pecora (a closely related and frequently confused form) in ways that overlap with pegora, but the legal sources treat pegora as the operative collective form for flock-grazing quadrupeds specifically.