Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/363

 cases relieved him altogether of the obligation, whilst he also attempted to institute some legal relationship among the emancipated by tracing the connections of a family through those still retained in slavery. Another liberal provision of this Emperor was that if an unmarried man kept one of his slaves as a concubine and died intestate, she and her children forthwith became free instead of passing into the hands of the heirs as part of the inheritance. He also pronounced against foundlings being reduced into servitude, either as slaves or serfs, on the assumption that they were not free born. By the same rule a slave cast out or abandoned, the fate sometimes of those who had become useless through illness or decrepitude, became free. Yet the colons or serfs of an estate gained no step towards freedom in this reign; on the contrary Justinian confirmed the laws which bound them to the soil and interdicted them from migrating to another locality under pain of forfeiting their chance of being emancipated. In this connection he feared, doubtless, lest anything which might hamper the profitable cultivation of estates would lessen the returns to the fisc.

2. The very harsh laws of debt, which prevailed among the primitive Romans, were one of the chief sources of civil commotion in the first centuries of the Republic. The defaulting debtor might be seized by his creditor, imprisoned, and sold as a slave; and the terms of one law of the Twelve Tables have been held by many jurists to indicate that joint creditors were legally empowered to hew the body of their