VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 3
Roman Law Defines the Person as a Thing
The last section had Aristotle reason the thing round. This section has the Romans write it down. Written with great precision, great calm, able to bear the closest scrutiny. This one stroke shaped two thousand years to come. Every contract signed today still has it in the bone.
Rome pushed it to the limit of the ancient world
Rome took the Greek set over, and pushed it a great step further.
From the late Republic to the early Empire, the slave population is estimated at a third of the whole population of the empire. In some parts of the Italian peninsula, the slaves may have outnumbered the free.
A wealthy Roman house held several hundred to several thousand slaves. For a noble household to keep several thousand people at once was nothing rare.
The last chapter but one counted that roster, here look at it again. Cooks, gardeners, teachers, doctors, clerks, dancing girls, fighters, craftsmen of every kind.
Look once more at those two, teacher and doctor. How the children of this house learn their letters, who tends the master of this house when he falls ill, both are on this roster.
Think back to the room at the opening of this volume. That master who could not cook was exactly such a Roman. His life was held in those several hundred pairs of hands.
Then they wrote it into the law
Roman law had exceedingly precise provisions for the legal standing of the slave.
In the Law of the Twelve Tables, and later in the great body of the codified law, the slave was defined as a thing.
Property. Under the one same class as the ox, the horse, the land, the house.
The master could buy and sell, give away, pledge, and rent out his slave, on the one same principle as he bought and sold, gave away, pledged, and rented out his ox.
Read that line again. On the one same principle.
Not nearly the same. Not similar. In law, it is the one same principle, the one same column, the one same box.
That article of 286 before the common era
The Romans did their work to a precision that turns a person cold.
The Aquilian law of 286 before the common era laid down that a man who killed another’s slave had to make good the market value of that slave.
The manner of making good was exactly the same as for killing another’s livestock.
Take the logic of this article and see it clear, one character at a time.
A person has died. Who has taken the loss.
By this law, the one who took the loss is the master. Because his property is gone.
And the person who died, himself. The law does not mention him. Because in the sense of the law, he is not a person at all. He is that thing that was destroyed.
This is the coldest stroke in the volume
Stop here a moment.
The Shang dragged the person off to sacrifice to heaven. That was violence, that was ugly, and yet it was honest.
This article of Rome’s has not one fierce character in it. It speaks of making good, of market value, of how a civil dispute is to be settled. It is fair, it is reasoned, it is even-handed to both sides.
It dealt fairly with those two people. The one who did the harm, and the one who lost the property.
It only did not count the third person in.
See this layer clear. This is not barbarism. This is civilization. This is the most precise set of things in the history of human law, the ancestor of countless codes to come, the thing still taught in the law schools today.
And the thing it did is this. It struck a person out of the column marked human.
Wei the more refined is the harder to recognize. This line, by here, is no longer a piece of reasoning. It is that article of law, set before your eyes.
It was handed down
This whole precise construction of Roman law, taking the person as property, shaped two thousand years to come.
It was the legal template for the slave trade certain nations later ran across the seas. What the ship carried was cargo, what fell into the sea was loss, and loss could be claimed back from the insurer. Every step had an article of law to hold it up.
In a certain sense, it is also the ancestor of modern property law. To buy a thing today, to sell a thing, to pledge a thing, that whole set of rules has its root right here.
Hold this layer, for it is the most important buried thread in the volume. Roman law, by this move, turned the person into property.
This move will appear again two thousand years on. Only by then the object has changed.
Changed to labor power. Changed to debt.
Turn this column into today’s shape
Look at today.
Today there is no law that writes the person into the column of things. This is true, this is an extraordinary advance, two thousand years were not walked for nothing, and on this the volume is not vague.
But look once more.
A person’s labor power can be bought and sold by the hour. A person’s thirty years can be pledged to the bank. A person’s attention can be packaged and sold to the advertiser, a thousand exposures worth so much, with a going rate, with a quoted price. A person’s health data, his whereabouts, what he is watching at three in the morning, all of it can be priced.
The person did not go into the column of things.
But the things sliced off the person, one piece at a time, went into that column.
Think back to the eighth chapter of this semester. A thousand fingers of bondservants. Sima Qian did not count people, he counted fingers.
Today too they do not count people. Today they count work-hours, count traffic, count clicks, count monthly payments.
This move the Romans finished two thousand years ago. To turn a living person into a column that can be priced, moved along, entered into the books.
What later people did was only to make this move finer, and harder to see.
What this chapter set up, and the turn to the next chapter
This chapter is walked through, and the ninth meaning stands steady.
The first section, the philosophy of Athens was dug up out of a mine. One in three a slave, twenty to thirty thousand under the ground, the freedom of that vote bought with their whole lives. The second section, Aristotle’s line, the natural slave. That line it is only right grown to its most decent shape, and wei at its most refined comes out of the finest mind of the age. The third section, Roman law wrote the person into the column of things. A person killed, and what is made good is the master’s loss, because in the sense of the law he is not a person.
The line this layer sets up is this. This position is not the ailment of some one culture. Two civilizations that never met, each walking to the step where it is only right is made into an institution, grew things whose frame is exactly alike. Wherever wei is made into an institution, there a thing of similar form will grow.
Then, walked to this step, where can the chain go next. It can go further. The next step, the chain will vanish.
Truly vanish. There is no iron on the person any more. He has a name, a family, his own small house, a little patch of his own ground. He belongs to no one.
And still he cannot leave.
The next chapter, the serf, that position changes a layer of skin.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.