Institutio Oratoria

Further I have removed competence from those which I called species. For I often asserted, as all who have attended my lectures will remember, and even those discourses which were published against my will [*](See I. Proem. 7.) included the

I am, however, well aware that the point of competence is raised in many cases, since in practically every case in which a party is said to have been ruled out of court through some error of form, questions such as the following arise: whether it was lawful for this person to bring an action, or to bring it against some particular person, or under a given law, or in such a court, or at such a time, and so on

But the question of competence as regards persons, times, legal actions and the rest originates in some pre-existent cause: the question turns therefore not on competence itself, but on the cause with which the point of competence originates.

You ought to demand the return of a deposit not before the praetor but before the consuls, as the sum is too large to come under the praetor's jurisdiction.