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Nexum was a debt bondage contract in the early Roman Republic. A debtor pledged his person as collateral if he defaulted on his loan. Details as to the contract are obscure and some modern scholars dispute its existence. It was allegedly abolished either in 326 or 313 BC.
In any case, such contracts were voluntary – in contrast to standard debt bondage in which a person was enslaved for failure to pay debts – and it is likely that a person reduced to bondage probably remained there permanently. Additionally, 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.
The purpose of the contract is also unclear. If it was not a means to repay debt through labour in lieu of payment, it may have been a signal to ensure prompt repayment in allowing a creditor to "proceed with personal execution on the debtor" if the borrower did not repay promptly. Some scholars doubt nexum's specific existence.
Despite constraining a free person's liberty ( libertas), nexum was probably preferred to slavery or death for debtors: non-repayment of debts under the Twelve Tables resulted either in the total loss of citizenship rights through enslavement and sale across the Tiber or in the physical cutting up of the debtor's body. Though nexi were often beaten and abused by their creditors, 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 son for nexum, instead of himself.
According to the Augustan-era historian Livy, nexum was abolished because of the excessive cruelty and lust of a single usurer, Lucius Papirius. He reports that in 326 BC, a young boy named Gaius Publilius was a 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.Although slaves were subject to sexual use by their masters, citizens who fell into debt bondage were not supposed to surrender the physical autonomy that protected the free from corporal punishment or sexual abuse. He tried to seduce Publilius; when rejected, Papirius grew impatient and reminded the boy of his position as bondsman and had him stripped and lashed. The wounded boy ran into the street, and an outcry among the people led the to pass 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.Livy 8.28.
Marcus Terentius Varro alternatively dates the abolishment of nexum to 313 BC, during the Roman dictator of Gaius Poetelius Libo Visolus, who would have been the homonymous son of the Poetelius, who was consul in 326 BC.
Modern views of nexums abolition also relate to the structural economic forces of Roman conquest: the success of Roman arms by the time of the Second Samnite war would have produced large amount of free land on which Roman colonists were settled with a corresponding influx of slaves to substitute for indigenous bond labour, making nexum "a relic of a bygone age".
Cicero considered the abolishment of the nexum primarily a political maneuver to temporarily appease the plebs masses, who by Cicero's time (some three hundred years after any alleged lex Poetelia Papiria) were believed to have 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.
Although the lex Poetelia ostensibly abolished imprisonment for debts, debt bondage continued in Rome for long after. Courts could still grant creditors the right to take insolvent debtors as bond slaves after a judgement so ordering.
Lewis and Short, an 1879 Latin dictionary, derives the word instead from the verb necto meaning "I bind".
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