Nexum was a debt bondage contract in the early Roman Republic. The debtor pledged his person as collateral should he default on his loan. Nexum was abolished by the Lex Poetelia Papiria in 326 BC.
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The contract
Nexum was a form of mancipatio, a symbolic transfer of rights that involved a set of scales, copper weights, and a formulaic oath. Under the nexum contract, a free man became a bond slave, or nexus, until he could pay off his debt to the creditor, or obaeratus. Varro derives the word nexum from nec suum, "not one's own," and although this etymology is incorrect in light of modern scientific linguistics, it illuminates how the Roman understood the term.
It remains unclear whether debtors entered into a nexum contract initially with their loan or if they entered voluntarily after they could not pay off an existing debt, though the former seems more likely to be the case. Additionally, there is no single formal nexum contract that all nexi entered – it is possible that there were many variations of the nexum contract, and that the details of nexum contracts were worked out on a case-by-case basis.
Debt-bondage existed in the early Republic largely as a result of increasing control over the ager publicus, or public land, by individuals who acquired disproportionate wealth and power and distorted the republican ideal of a commonwealth. As farmers and laborers lost access to the land that theoretically was held in common by the Roman people (populus Romanus), they were unable to earn a living, and nexum was resorted to as security for debts.
Despite constraining a free person's liberty (libertas), nexum contracts were a preferable alternative to slavery for debtors, since slaves could be sold or killed by their masters at will. Though nexi were often beaten and abused by their obaerati, they maintained (if sometimes only in theory) their Roman citizenship and rights. Creditors might profit more from a nexum contract, as they received a motivated contractual worker instead of a slave. An indebted paterfamilias, or legal head of the Roman household, might offer his own son for nexum instead of himself.
Abolishment
According to the Augustan-era historian Livy, nexum was abolished because of the excessive cruelty and lust of a single usurer, Lucius Papirius. In 326 BC, a young boy named Gaius Publilius was guarantor to his father’s debt, becoming the nexus of Papirius. (In another version, Dionysius of Halicarnassus records that Publilius borrowed the money for his father’s funeral.) The boy was noted for his youth and beauty, and Papirius desired him sexually. He tried to seduce Publilius with “lewd conversation,” but when the boy failed to respond, Papirius grew impatient and reminded the boy of his position as bond slave. When the boy again refused his forceful advances, Papirius had him stripped and lashed. The wounded boy ran into the street, and an outcry among the people led the consuls to convene the senate, resulting in the Lex Poetelia Papiria, which forbade holding debtors in bondage for their debt and required instead that the debtor’s property be used as collateral. All people confined under the nexum contract were released, and nexum as a form of legal contract was forbidden thereafter.
Varro alternatively dates the abolishment of nexum to 313 BC, during the dictatorship of Gaius Poetelius Libo Visolus. Poetelius, after whom the Lex Poetelia Papiria is named, held his third consulship in 326 BC, the date that Livy records.
Cicero considered the abolishment of nexum primarily a political maneuver to temporarily appease the plebeian masses, who by Cicero’s time (almost 300 years after the Lex Poetelia Papiria) had carried out three full-scale secessions:
When the plebeians have been so weakened by the expenditures brought on by a public calamity that they give way under their burden, some relief or remedy has been sought for the difficulties of this class, for the sake of the safety of the whole body of citizens
Though nexum as a legal contract was abolished, debt bondage persisted in the case of defaulting debtors, since a court could grant creditors the right to take insolvent debtors as bond slaves.