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[49] [f] Cicero (1st century BC) asserted that liberty “does not consist in having a just master (dominus), but in having none.” [51] The common Latin word for "slave" was servus, [g] but in Roman law, a slave as chattel was mancipium, [52] a grammatically neuter word [53] meaning something "taken in hand," manus, a metaphor for possession ...
As a social institution, chattel slavery classes slaves as chattels (personal property) owned by the enslaver; like livestock, they can be bought and sold at will. [23] Chattel slavery was historically the normal form of slavery and was practiced in places such as the Roman Empire and classical Greece, where it was considered a keystone of society.
Solon's reforms occurred in the context of democratic politics at Athens that required clearer distinctions between "free" and "slave"; as a perverse consequence, chattel slavery increased. [ 39 ] The selling of one's own child into slavery is likely in most cases to have resulted from extreme poverty or debt, but strictly speaking is a form of ...
Beginning in the Virginia royal colony in 1662, colonial governments incorporated the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem into the laws of slavery, ruling that the children born in the colonies took the place or status of their mothers; therefore, children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery as chattel, regardless of the status of ...
For Aquinas, slavery only arises through positive law. St Thomas Aquinas in mid-thirteenth century accepted the new Aristotelian view of slavery as well as the titles of slave ownership derived from Roman civil law and attempted—without complete success—to reconcile them with Christian patristic tradition.
Punishment and killing of slaves: Slave codes regulated how slaves could be punished, usually going so far as to apply no penalty for accidentally killing a slave while punishing them. [9] Later laws began to apply restrictions on this, but slave-owners were still rarely punished for killing their slaves. [ 10 ]
Under Islamic law, in "what might be called civil matters", a slave was "a chattel with no legal powers or rights whatsoever", states Lewis. A slave could not own or inherit property or enter into a contract. However, he was better off in terms of rights than Greek or Roman slaves. [128]
Of particular interest is a law stipulating that reward for the capture of an escaped slave would be higher if the slave had already succeeded in crossing the Halys River and getting farther away from the center of Hittite civilization — from which it can be concluded that at least some of the slaves kept by the Hittites possessed a realistic ...