Скачать или смотреть Roman Law Called Conquered Women “Things” — And It Shaped Western Justice

Roman law is often described as the foundation of Western justice, shaping modern ideas of rights, contracts, and legal personhood. But buried inside Roman legal texts is a classification system most history books avoid confronting—one that defined conquered women not as people, but as res, a Latin legal term meaning “things.”

In this video, we examine what Roman law actually said about women using primary sources from the Digest of Justinian, the Institutes of Gaius, and Republican-era legal commentary. These texts show how conquered women were legally classified alongside land, livestock, and equipment, entered into property registers, transferred through formal purchase rituals, and valued according to reproductive capacity rather than human rights.

Using Roman census procedures, administrative inventories, and price schedules like the Edict of Diocletian, we trace how enslaved women were assessed, priced, and distributed across the empire after conquests in places like Carthage, Gaul, and Dacia. Roman agricultural manuals by Varro, Cato, and Columella reveal how slave reproduction was treated as an economic resource, analyzed with the same language used for crops and farm animals.

This legal classification had devastating consequences. Women classified as res had no legal personhood. They could not consent, testify, own property, or control their own bodies. Roman law explicitly stated partus sequitur ventrem—the child follows the womb—meaning children born to enslaved women were legally property from birth. This principle became foundational to later systems of slavery and deeply influenced medieval law, canon law, English common law, and even American slave codes.

By following this legal framework forward through history, we uncover how Roman definitions of property, gender, and reproduction shaped Western legal traditions long after the Roman Empire collapsed. The same legal logic that defined women as objects under Roman law resurfaced in debates over married women’s legal identity, inheritance, bodily autonomy, and enslavement centuries later.

This is not cultural relativism or metaphor—it is documented legal reality. Roman law worked exactly as designed, creating precise categories that enabled empire, economic extraction, and population control. Understanding this history changes how we think about the legal systems we inherited and the assumptions embedded within them.

If you’re interested in Roman history, legal history, women in ancient history, slavery in the Roman Empire, personhood and property, and how legal language shapes human lives, this investigation reveals what the sources actually say—and why their legacy still matters.

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