The idea of ​​life does not figure in Roman law as a legal concept because in the ancient world it was not considered neither sacred nor inviolable. Indeed, its presence would seem limited to a negative instance, the vitae necisque potestas (power over life or death), an old custom that goes back to the Roman Republic and that, as long as there was iusta causa (i.e., fair cause in the moral sphere), it allowed the father to kill his children to exercise control over the family’s behavior. As far as the law is concerned, says Agamben, “life appears originally in law only as the counterpart of a power that threatens death.”¹ This power of the pater familias, which was limited to the patrician families through legal marriage, evinces the original niche of the idea of ​​sovereignty within the family and, at the same time, turns it into a terrible place that makes the sons, daughters and the wife the first human victims of exception.²

In her magnificent book Los jardines de Bomarzo (The Gardens of Bomarzo), Dutch writer Hella Haasse talks about a Roman custom according to which brides of high birth came to the altar on a snow-white horse and surrounded by relatives and friends of the family; the entourage, however, did not include any other women. This tradition, according to Sanuto the Younger, a Venetian historian of the twelfth century, also dictated that the bride and groom should eat honey together, but

while the woman tastes the honey, a drawn sword is kept over her head, so that she understands that her obligations consist above all in taking care of the burdens of the home and respecting the laws of marriage.³

The woman, says Haasse, “could not enjoy sweet earthly things without a sword hovering over her head… ”⁴ Like Egle, Virgil's nayad (0.2), even if they are in a pleasant place, women are always threatened. Of course, the dangers and privations that applied to wives also applied to the daughters. Wives and daughters are banned, abandoned. Ban is an old germanic term which, says Agamben, “designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia of the sovereign.”⁵, that is, it excludes by including and includes by excluding.

What does it mean to be abandoned?, asks Carolina Sanín,

It means barefoot. Wearing a tiny white dress you can see through. Daughter of man. The last one on the right in a group of men lined up shoulder to shoulder and facing forward. Smaller than all of them. It means very poor.⁶

The only way out of this regime of exception, reserved for freeborn males, was to eventually become a pater familias themselves, thus ensuring the perpetuation of the terrible place in the bosom of the roman family. And even then every free male was subject to the power over life or death while his father was alive.

---

1. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, 4. ↩︎
2. It is important to note that the vitae necisque potestas was limited to the male offspring if they had committed high treason, bribery or military disobedience. Agamben emphasizes that this legal instance should not be confused “with the power to kill, which lies within the competence of the father or the husband who catches his wife or daughter in the act of adultery.” The fact remains that both legal instances turn the family into the original locus of exception, which will later be extended to the magistrates and all other political figures with imperium. ↩︎
3. Hella Haasse, Los jardines de Bomarzo, 75. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 69 ↩︎
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 23. ↩︎
6. Carolina Sanín, Somos luces abismales, 16. Author's translation. ↩︎