1 - The Reasonable Person in the Past

Summary

This chapter explains that the reasonable person was not the first anthropomorphised legal standard. The idea of model characters can be traced back to the oldest documents of humanity. The chapter introduces three of these ancient ancestors of the reasonable person: the silent person of Egypt (geru maa), the earnest person of Greece (ho spoudaios), and the male head of a family in ancient Rome (paterfamilias). There are many other ancestors of the reasonable person, and at least implicit anthropomorphised standards of behaviour could probably be found in any society at any time. The three concepts here are presented only as examples, and because they form part of one Mediterranean context in which the ancient Egyptians probably influenced the ancient Greeks, who in turn influenced the Romans, whose influence on contemporary European law and on the systems derived from it can still be felt. Each of the three figures introduced in this chapter deserves its own biography and the analysis offered here remains fragmented. Nonetheless, the selected aspects of the lives of the geru maa, of the spoudaios, and of paterfamilias foreshadow many of the questions, tensions, and challenges with which the common law’s reasonable person still struggles today.