CHAPTER XVIII - Enslavement (cont.)

Summary

We have now to consider those cases of enslavement iure civili which Justinian introduced or retained. Several are recorded, but few are important in the general law. The less important will be treated first.

(a) Defaulting claimants of liberty. As we shall see later, Justinian abolished the need of adsertores (free persons acting on behalf of the claimant of liberty), in causae liberates, and allowed the claimants to conduct their own cases. He required them to give personal security, but if this were impossible, they were to give a sworn undertaking—cautio iuratoria. If after these preliminaries they failed to appear, and, being duly cited, remained absent for a year, they were adjudged slaves of the other party, whatever the real merits of the case may have been.

(b) False pretence and collusion of dominus. If an owner by his fraud and collusion passed his slave off as a freeman and obtained a judgment to that effect, Domitian provided that the person so adjudicated free should be decreed a slave of anyone who denounced him. But as he can hardly be said to have been free before, this case will be more appropriately discussed later, in connexion with the general law as to the effect of such adjudication.

(c) Slaves sold for export and freed. The Vatican Fragments contain a text, in part corrupt, to the effect that if a slave is sold with a condition that he is to be kept away from a certain place, with a power of seizure on return, and he does return, still a slave, the vendor may seize him and keep him as his slave.