Debt Slavery: Rome Banned It Before Christianity

Rome abolished slavery by debt 700 years before Christ

A Roman citizen of full rights could be sold into slavery if they failed to pay their debts. This practice remained in force until the Lex Poetelia Papiria banned it in 326 BC, nearly seven centuries before Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. This fact—a law with a date—summarizes the core of a debate that has played out for weeks: whether the three Abrahamic religions improved or worsened the lives of those who lived under their mantle.

The discussion begins with an uncomfortable premise: imagining what the West would be like without Judaism, Christianity, and Sarracin. The most common answer is not epic; it is legal. And this is where romanticism falls short.

Did monotheism bring improvements or just another master?

Part of the analysis maintains that without the restraint of monotheism, the norm would have been a caste society, hereditary slavery, and life subservient to the will of the master. The Oooo-Christian sarracena, in this reading, functioned as a limit to the law of the strongest.

The rebuttal is sharper: those limits were nothing new. Rome had banned slavery by debt centuries before, and Greco-Roman paganism had been discredited among educated elites for generations, who only retained from it what served a social or practical function. In this narrative, Christianity did not bring pogre; it capitalized on it.

Japan, South Korea and China as economic counterexamples

The argument that generates the most friction is regarding prosperity. Japan, South Korea, and China appear as societies without Abrahamic religions and with comparable development indicators. The counterattack is twofold: much of their population identifies as unreligious today rather than pagan; and, above all, Japan was in feudalism at the end of the 19th century, South Korea was third-world in 1950, and China had accumulated famines for sixty years. When these countries took off, religion had already played its hand.

Marian dogma and the origin of languages

The secondary fronts are equally harsh. There is discussion about whether the cult of the Virgin was a pagan borrowing or a dogma of faith, and when Christ began to be considered God's son. Parallel to this is a digression into the origin of language: whether languages are purely human development or if they require Revelation, with Rousseau and Derrida thrown in as crossfire ammunition.

The conclusion is drawn by chronology. Nero died four hundred years before Odoacer entered Rome, so attributing the fall of the Empire to him is a leap into thin air. However, another date throws everything into perspective: if something is becoming de-Christianized in the West, that process began to loosen in 1960, not in 326 BC.