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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8760635" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah absolutely though in Rome it's even more complicated because there's actual dispute as to whether laws were even enacted/enforced, and whether laws found in certain records actually were laws (or something the person making that record made up), or whether we're even understanding the meaning of the law correctly on a basic level (not even interpretation/reinterpretation sense, but the does it literally even mean what we assume it means) stuff. A lot of the best evidence is primary sources commenting on the enforcement of laws, but they relatively rarely talk about slave-related stuff. There was a remarkable law in Rome where if a master was murdered by a slave, all his slaves were to be put to death regardless of their involvement, and that happened at least once, but it caused such a massive kerfuffle among the middle and working classes of Rome (interestingly - you might not have thought they'd have cared but they clearly did) that it's unclear if it ever got enforced again, for fear of outright rioting. An awful lot of Roman laws got revoked or just not enforced because of riots/protests, including, famously the Lex Oppia, which attempted to limit what women could own and control their dress. Initially this was part of a package of emergency economic measures (including ones that impacted men), but much later Cato (the Elder) and others argued for it to be extended on astonishingly misogynist grounds (it's totally fair to say this - Cato's speech on the matter is recorded it's some of the most venomous and frankly stupid* misogyny one can imagine), even when Rome was totally flush with cash. But after Cato gave his speech, the women in question turned up and just jammed up proceedings (and possibly even beat up some Senators) all across Rome until the Lex Oppia got revoked (Cato of course went off to commit outright genocide in Spain, as was the fashion at the time).* = One thing you really see in ancient history and classics is that loads of people in past, who were celebrated from like the renaissance well into the 20th century were, well just ghastly low-quality human beings, even by the standards of the time, and who were frankly, often very absolutely intellectually bankrupt, and when you ask why anyone was praising them, it becomes obvious that it's at least in part because these figures legitimized similar behaviour by more modern characters. This idea that because some dimwit from 200 BC did something, it was beautiful and traditional and cultured, is just hilarious in retrospect. Cato's only real surviving work is this thing upper-class Romans love to write - a farming manual - and the stretches from various scholars to make out it's anything but a bunch of opinionated and fatuous waffle mixed with the basic truisms masquerading as wisdom are astonishing.</blockquote>

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