BERVIIS (Lat.). A slave.
The institution of slavery is traced to the re motest antiquity. It is referred to in the poems of Homer; and all the Greek philosophers u3ention it without the slightest censure. Aristotle justified it on the ground of a diversity of race. The Roman jurists rest the institution af slavery on the Isw of nations: in a fragment of Florentinus copied in the Institutes of Justinian, servitude is defined, Servitue avtem eat conatitutio juria geutium, qua gide dominio alieno contra naturam eubjicitur. D. 1. 5.
4. 1 ; Inst. 1. 3. 2. The Romans considered that they bad the right of killing their prisooers of war, Malin capte ; and that by preserving their lives, aervati, they did not abandon but only post poned tho exercise of that right. Such was, accord ing to their ideas, the origin of the right of the master over his slave. Hence the etyu3ology of the words aervi, from aerrati, and mancipia, from many capti, hy which slaves were designated. P is, however, more simple and correct to derive tl word aervue from aervire. Inst. 1. 3. 3. Childrci horn of a woman who was a slave followed the condition of their mother : eervi naaeuntur aut fiunt.
2. A free, person might be reduced to slavery in various ways : by captivity, ex captivitate. The Roman who was taken pri soner by the enemy lost all his rights as a citizen and a freeman : thus, when Regulus was brought to Rome by the Carthaginian ambassadors he refused to take hie seat among the senators, saying that he was nothing but a slave. But if he made his escape and returned to Rome, all his rights vrere restored to him by the jus postlimini i; and, by a legal fiction, the whole period of his captivity was effaced, and he WRS considered as if he had never lost his freedoin. Accord ing to the laws of the Twelve Tables, the in solvent debtor became the slave of his cre ditor, by a judgment rendered in a proceeding called manta injectio,—one of the four leges actiones. The thief who was taken in the matinour—that is to say, in the act of stealing, or while he was carrying the thing stolen to tbe place where be intended to tioneeal it- was deprived of his freedom, and became a slave. So was a person, mil°, for the purpose
of defrauding the state, ommitted to have his name inscribed on the table of the census. The illicit intercourse of a free woman with a slave without the permissian of his master, the sentence to a capital punishment and the sentence to work perpetually in the mines,—in metallum dati,—inade the culprit the slave RS his punishment (servi pwrice). The ingratitude of the emancipated slave towards his patron or former master and the fraud of a freeman who had suffered him self to be sold by an accomplice (after having attained the age of twenty years) in order to divide the price of the sale, were so punished.
8. Liberty being inalienable, no one could sell himself ; but in order to perpetrate a fraud on thapurchaser, a freeman was offered for sale as a slave and bought by an innocent purchaser: after the price had been paid and divided between the confederates, the pretended slave claimed and, of course, ob tained his freedom. To remedy this evil and punish this fraud, a senatus consultum issued under Claudius provided that, the person who had thus suikred himself to be sold should lose his liberty and remain a slave. In thc social and political organization slaves were not taken into consideration ; they had no status. Quod attiner ad jus civile, servi pro nullis habentur. Servitutem mortalitati fere coinparainus. With regard to the master there was no distinction in the condition of elaves: they were all equally subject to the domina potestas. But the master sometimes established a distinction between the servi vicarii and the servi ordinarii : the former exercised a certain authority over the latter. But there was a marked difference between those slaves of whom we have been speaking and the coloni adscripti, and tribu tarii, who resembled the serfs of the middle ages. I Ortolan, 27 et seq. ; 1 Etienne. 68 et seq. ; Lagrange, 93 et seq. See SLAVE ; SLAVERY.