In the past couple of posts I’ve talked a bit about the Roman legal text known as the Twelve Tables. One of the things that makes studying the Twelve Tables both frustrating and intriguing is that while the Twelve Tables was important to Roman lawyers and jurists who used it as the basis of complex legal arguments and interpretations of law, when the Romans wrote the Twelve Tables, their conception of law was much simpler. As a result, when we try to reconstruct how the Romans used the Twelve Tables around the time that they wrote it, that is, during the 5th and 4th centuries, it is very likely that they used the same word to refer to separate, complex processes. This narrow range of vocabulary is quite unlike the later Romans, who expected different words and phrases to refer to differ laws or legal processes.
One of the consequences of the simple legal language of the early Roman period is that a very important word for manumission, liber, likely refers to a host of different meanings. The question of what liber means in a particular situation is important to us because there is the following clause in the Twelve Tables:
si pater ter filium uenum duit, a patre filius liber esto.
If a father thrice sell a son, from the father the son is to be free. (IV.2, trans. Crawford).
The jurists Gaius and Ulpian, along with the antiquarians Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Aulius Gellius, all testify to to this law of early Rome. The obvious question, why would the Romans need to free the sons of men who had sold them into slavery three times?
The answer is that it all depends on what is meant by the phrase “venum duit”, which is not a phrase used at all to describe the sale of slave. In his commentary on this law, Crawford is emphatic that in this point in Roman legal literature, there is no way to distinguish this phrase between a permanent sale and hiring out. Watson uses this ambiguity to paint an intriguing picture of the life of Rome during this time.
In the 5th and 4th centuries, the Romans permitted a form of debt-bondage called nexum. The basic idea is that if you take out a loan, you can give as security your own self. What does this have to do with sons? Well while the Romans were not yet very legally savvy, they could still understand and grant the right to alienate your labor. As a result, if a man owed himself as a security to a debt that he couldn’t repay, he could have his son perform the work instead. This law appears to be attempting to on the one hand reserve the right of fathers to do this practice but on the other hand respect the rights of the sons as citizens who should be sold into slavery because another citizen could not repay his debts.
One of the consequences of the simple legal language of the early Roman period is that a very important word for manumission, liber, likely refers to a host of different meanings. The question of what liber means in a particular situation is important to us because there is the following clause in the Twelve Tables:
si pater ter filium uenum duit, a patre filius liber esto.
If a father thrice sell a son, from the father the son is to be free. (IV.2, trans. Crawford).
The jurists Gaius and Ulpian, along with the antiquarians Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Aulius Gellius, all testify to to this law of early Rome. The obvious question, why would the Romans need to free the sons of men who had sold them into slavery three times?
The answer is that it all depends on what is meant by the phrase “venum duit”, which is not a phrase used at all to describe the sale of slave. In his commentary on this law, Crawford is emphatic that in this point in Roman legal literature, there is no way to distinguish this phrase between a permanent sale and hiring out. Watson uses this ambiguity to paint an intriguing picture of the life of Rome during this time.
In the 5th and 4th centuries, the Romans permitted a form of debt-bondage called nexum. The basic idea is that if you take out a loan, you can give as security your own self. What does this have to do with sons? Well while the Romans were not yet very legally savvy, they could still understand and grant the right to alienate your labor. As a result, if a man owed himself as a security to a debt that he couldn’t repay, he could have his son perform the work instead. This law appears to be attempting to on the one hand reserve the right of fathers to do this practice but on the other hand respect the rights of the sons as citizens who should be sold into slavery because another citizen could not repay his debts.