previous next
[27] For the opponent will say that the person in question is actually serving as a slave or is legally in a state of servitude. We must therefore look for properties and differences, to which in passing I devoted a brief discussion in my fifth book.1 A slave when manumitted becomes a freedman: a man who is assigned for debt becomes a free man on the restoration of his liberty. A slave cannot acquire his freedom without the consent of his master: a man assigned for debt can acquire it by paying his debt without the consent of his master being necessary. A slave is outside the law; a man assigned for debt is under the law. Turning to properties, we may note the following which are possessed by none save the free, the three names (praenomen, nomen and cognomen) and membership of a tribe, all of which are possessed by the man assigned for debt.

1 V. x. 60.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Introduction (Harold Edgeworth Butler, 1922)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: