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According to the revised Roman chronicle, the political reform in Rome is set at the year BC and the social reform at the year BC. In BC, the nobility united with the plebeians to overthrow the reign of the last king, Tarconvin.
Institutional innovations inevitably had a profound impact on economic and social relations, with rulers on the one hand interested in developing new landlords and chaebols, and on the other hand vigorously suppressing small and medium-sized farmers, causing them to go bankrupt with debts and become slaves or servants of creditors.
In BC, Rome was in a state of internal and external troubles, on the one hand, the war with the Volsky people was urgent, and the conscription was urgently needed, on the other hand, the tension between the debt relationship caused the nobles and the commoners to fall into discord, people showed their disability or shackles caused by debt contracts, and the debtors surrounded Curia, threatening the Senate to change the legislation.
Finally, the consul Publius Servius issued a decree: No one shall bind the citizens of Rome so that they cannot register for the army recruited by the consul, no one shall possess or sell the property of persons serving in military camps, and shall not detain their children and grandchildren.
At the same time, a ban was ordered on the further arrest of persons imprisoned for debt. As soon as the order was issued, debtors who were freed from debt imprisonment were sworn in to enlist.
After the victory in the war, the consuls of Publius Serveleus betrayed the law and re-examined the debtors, who were once again slaves to creditors, and the people demanded protection from the consuls and the senate. The resentment between the nobles and the commoners grew, and it was clear that the creditors gradually became dangerous and panicked in the face of the numerically superior debtors.
As Russo said, "The poor have nothing to lose but freedom, and unless they are crazy beyond measure, they will never abandon their only freedom of property for free."
On the part of the rich, it can be said that they are cautious about their wealth, but they are the most vulnerable. The following year, fighting resumed. The Senate had no choice but to appoint Manus Vallelius as dictator.
After the war was won again, the dictator again defended the victorious Roman citizens and demanded debt reform, which the Senate again refused.
At this time the army began to stir. Led by their elected civilian-turned-military tribunes, they abandoned their heavy debts and intended to build a new civilian city.
At this time, whether it was the senate, the nobility, or the creditors, of course, they were probably the same person, they were nervous.
Because they are afraid of the division of the country and, as a result, a civil war, which is more likely to end in their economic bankruptcy.
In this way, the Senate compromised, and the nobles reached an agreement with the commoners. However, as Kovalov said, the separation was mainly due to debt slavery, and there was no mention of debt settlement in the treaty concluded between the two sides.
We believe, however, that the operation of the previous law on debts should have been halted, since the powers of the tribune include the power to stop the application of any law, as well as the power to veto the actions of all officials, including the consuls, and, more importantly, the power to prevent or annul the prosecution of debtors.
In this way, the debt problem began as a social problem but was solved as a political problem. This also opened the history of the Roman people's opposition to debt imprisonment and debt oppression.
In the struggle of debt relations, creditors and debtors actively safeguard their own interests on the one hand, and on the other hand, they have to accept realistic compromises and concessions, pursue a balance of interests, and in debt legislation, not only strictly protect the interests of creditors, but also free the debtor from the original heavy burden.
Abolition of debt slavery
Despite the contrary to the law prohibiting the borrowing of debt for interest, the State tacitly approved the usury lending of creditors to the debtor in a customary form, and the compulsory measure of physical imprisonment of the debtor under the debt agreement was never interrupted.
After a long struggle, in BC, creditors and debtors finally reached a compromise and officially promulgated the Twelve Tables Law. The great significance of the Law of the Twelve Forms is to make all laws cultural and public, and the law is no longer the "private property" of the aristocracy.
However, a closer look shows that the "12-Form Law" has not undergone much change in the legislation of debt relations, and it still affirms and protects the interests of creditors, even an absolute creditorism, trampling on the rights and interests of debtors, especially personal rights and interests, and retaining the provisions on debt imprisonment, capital punishment or cutting debtors for those who cannot pay debts, and selling debtors into slavery.
If there is any progress that debtors have made in such debt legislation, it is that the measures taken by creditors to enforce against the debtor are governed by written procedural law, which, as we discussed earlier, embodies the binding aspect of legal lock-ups on creditors.
This situation was not improved until the enactment of the Petlius and Papilus Act on Debt Slavery. Scholars have different views on the date of its appearance: Livi believes that the law should have appeared in the year BC, while Varo believes that it appeared in the year BC.
Luchius was a usurer, and Gaius Publius was either acting as his father's guarantor or taking on a debt to Papilius for borrowing money to complete his father's funeral.
It is said that at that time Papilius was attracted by the appearance of the young man and seduced him, but was rejected by Publius, who repeatedly threatened him into being in the situation of a debtor.
The creditors ordered the juvenile to be stripped naked and flogged. Young people were beaten all over and rushed into the streets, angry at the lust and cruelty of their creditors.
A large crowd of Roman citizens gathered in the square, and the crowd flocked to the assembly hall and the senate. When the senators entered the senate, the debtors prostrate at the feet of the senators and showed their backs scarred from the whipping, and they asked the senate to amend the law on debts.
Finally, the consul was instructed to announce to the people that from now on, no one shall be detained in chains or shackles until he has paid his debts, except for those who are punished for causing harm.
It is only property, not the human body, that guarantees debt. This abolished debt slavery and the Act explicitly prohibited debt slavery at a later date.
He also mentions in fragments of Varro's writings that debtors who have sworn that they are unable to pay their debts and have surrendered all their property to bankrupt creditors cannot be enslaved.
Liwai argues that "the civilian seems to have gained another freedom" and that the debtor was freed from debt imprisonment and measures imposed on the debtor.
Of course, imprisonment imposed after a court sentence was preserved long after the enactment of the Boedria Law.
The implication was that no Roman citizen could be enslaved by his creditors without a court sentence.
That is, although the debt covenant is abolished as a legal contract, those who insist on non-performance can still be imprisoned, and the court can authorize the creditor to enslave the bankrupt debtor.
Cicero argued that the abrogation of the debt treaty was only due to creditor politics to temporarily appease the civilian population, since by the time Cicero had been implemented in recent years , three mass evacuations of civilians had broken out.
Gosa's debt reform
The ancient law provided that usurers were punished accordingly as private offenders, and the consuls proposed a twelfth interest bill in favor of the commoners, later limited to twenty-four-quarter interest, but it was not uncommon for creditors to lend to debtors and make a profit from them, forcing debts.
This creates a divide between the law of the text and the customs of society. On the one hand, the debtor believes that the creditor has violated ancient laws; On the other hand, creditors argue that judges should not restore laws that have been abandoned by society.
Originally a nobleman, Lotillin became heavily indebted by borrowing. He ran unsuccessfully for consulship several times, and in his third run for consul, his main program was to abolish debts.
He won the support of bankrupt people from all walks of life, but the election was still lost, which led him to decide to overthrow the republican system of the senatorial aristocracy. He promised to cancel debts for debtors and declared the rich unprotected by law.
But such a struggle ultimately failed. Tsa and Tirin, who belonged to the same era, had similar experiences. When the Three-Headed Alliance was formed, measures to declare public enemies on a large scale began. Creditors begin to be extremely afraid of their debtors.
Later, when the civil war broke out, credit relations were tense throughout Italy, on the one hand, creditors no longer borrowed artificially from debtors, and on the other hand, people repeatedly asked for the cancellation of debts due to civil strife, but he refused. After returning to Rome, he took a series of measures to cope with the debt crisis.
On the settlement of debts, he provided for the establishment of an arbitrator to value the debtor's property at the pre-war price, and the debtor could pay the creditor with his own property in lieu of money, which the creditor must accept; In the second half of the year BC, he also abolished the interest accrued on loans after the war began, and deliberately raised the valuation of these properties.
Some scholars have pointed out that Xisa also stipulates that the payment of interest, or the payment of interest on the payment of interest, should be deducted from the original loan principal.
Her approach was recognized as appropriate, and he made a delicate trade-off between the demand for complete debt forgiveness demanded by some radical politicians and the demand for the status quo demanded by a conservative creditor class such as Cicero.
On the one hand, he eliminated and alleviated the panic of taking debts caused by war and civil strife, so that the interests of creditors were preserved; On the other hand, although the previous measures against the debtor were abolished, they would still lead to the debtor's disgrace, and through the above measures, he also lifted the debtor's shameful punishment.
From the above-mentioned process of debt legislation, we can see that in the early debt relationship, the contradiction between the creditor and the debtor as the main body was sharp, and the debt problem itself was a social problem, but it was constantly solved in the form of legislation.
Under the level of economic development at that time, creditor-centrism has never wavered, but the path of debt legislation has developed from absolute creditorism to the direction of balancing the interests of debtors.