Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Legal (In)equality

the main determinant of a person’s actions. This set of views meant that all parts of a person’s life were relevant to evaluat ing the others, since they all stemmed from the same source. This must have been handy in cases where the Roman lack of record keeping and forensic science offered them little of what we could call evidence, but it seems to have carried over even to cases in which hard evidence did exist. From the point of view of modern courts, this broad view of character brings in a lot of “irrelevant” material, and cre ates at least the opportunity for bias, but not in a predictable way. What was its effect in Rome? We have good reason to believe that it would have created systematic advantages for the wealthy and well-born. In the previous chapter, we noted how the legal notion of disgrace was used to link status and morality. This linkage also appears in ethical thinking outside the law. The “official” theory was that only the independently wealthy were morally trustworthy, because only they could omit financial consider ations in making moral judgments. (They might be corrupt for other reasons, of course, but at least they had a chance.) So working for a wage, emblematic of the solid citizen in mod ern culture, was a cause for suspicion in Rome. Similar argu ments were made about underprivileged groups such as women and ex-slaves. Both were reputed to be morally unreliable and underhanded. A more sympathetic account might suggest that both groups had to learn indirection because they were denied official, public authority. Similarly, their dependence (like that of the nonwealthy) was an externally imposed situation.

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