De como el hombre llego a ser persona: los origines de un concepto jurídico en el Derecho Romano

Until the birth of Christ, De iure personarum was a construct in Roman law used to describe and execute the precedence of the pater familias over the rest of the Roman society: slaves, freed slaves, foreigners, spouses and children. Then, the right translation is “Law of the social status”. Due to the influence of natural law, the idea of freedom and equality, based on a unitary concept of the man, gained ground. In order to express this idea, the Roman lawyers used the term persona instead of homo since the latter is a technical expression referring to a slave and the former already had several meanings. Persona, a word that until then had been used to describe enchained men, now became a term for their vested rights of equality and freedom. This is the meaning of the Latin word persona that was adopted by the disciplines of theology and philosophy and became one of the most important legal concepts and philosophical ideas of the Western world.