The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has led to the declaration of a state of alarm in Spain on March 14, which decreed the confinement of the population in order to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Extreme situations such as this were also experienced in Roman times, as explained by the Roman law professor, Alejandro Valiño.

Thus, the rules laid down by those who held political power in the Roman world when frequent epidemics appeared entailed a restriction of individual rights for citizens, a situation similar to the provisions promoted by the Spanish government since the declaration of the state of alert.

The most recurrent measure in the first centuries of the Roman Republic (509 B.C.-27 B.C.) was the appointment of a dictator, a magistrate with extraordinary powers who had, for a maximum period of six months, a greater margin of maneuver than that of ordinary magistrates, whose exercise was suspended while the dictator remained in office. In this way, the rights of Roman citizens were temporarily restricted, details the professor of the Faculty of Law.

The most frequent causes that motivated the recourse to the dictatorship were the external threat and the internal political convulsions, but there are also cases in which the propagation of an epidemic forced the adoption of this measure, not so much because it conferred the dictator powers in the health field, but with the purpose of being more effective in the fight against its devastating effects,' asserts Alejandro Valiño.

Thus, sources report episodes in which the Roman army was highly decimated by the epidemic, thus being exposed to external attacks that gave rise to the appointment of a dictator. In other cases, Valiño points out, the appointment of a dictator because of the epidemic occurred in circumstances of maximum desperation. This is explained, as he points out, 'because the Romans felt that epidemics were a divine punishment derived from the ungodly carelessness in following the religious ritual marked by tradition’. 

The first solution to appease the divine anger was of a religious nature. As the professor of Roman law states, in 365 B.C., for example, a ceremonial called lectisternium was used, which consisted of a banquet to which significant deities of the Roman Pantheon were ideally invited. On that occasion, however, the epidemic was so devastating that, on the advice of the elders, the appointment of a peculiar dictator specifically named clavi figendi causa (for the purpose of driving a nail in) was resorted to on one of the walls of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. It was a practice based on a lex de clavo pangendo (law of nail insertion), which thus acted as a talisman to put an end to such a Dantesque situation.

The person named was Lucius Manlius Imperius, who, once the ritual was completed, wanted to continue exercising this intense power, to which the tribunes of the plebs reacted by imposing his immediate resignation. Alejandro Valiño points out that 'that anomalous and peculiar recourse to the institution of the dictatorship was not an isolated event, since the sources also inform us of other episodes that gave rise to the designation of a dictator clavi figendi causa with the same purpose: to appease the divine wrath in a climate of notable religious superstition’.

___

This content has been prepared by the institutional communication area of the Office of the Principal of the Universitat de València with the collaboration of the Faculty of Law.