Dipartimento di Diritto, Economia, Management e Metodi Quantitativi (DEMM)

The paper addresses the prohibition on gamete donation, which was recently revoked by a landmark judgment of the Italian Constitutional Court. In the first part, it explores the social and cultural context to and political debate regarding the Italian law on medically assisted reproduction. It then sets out a framework for analysing the progressive erosion of the ban. It presents the Court's clear intention finally to adopt a position, setting aside the reluctant stance of the past and the much-criticised tendency to 'decide not to decide'. The paper then concludes with a discussion of the scenarios to which the revocation of the ban has given rise.

Expensive jewelry was overtly considered in ancient Rome a symbol of female integration in society. Excluded from public offices, women never rebelled. The only time they protested was in 195 BCE when they supported the repeal of the lex Oppia passed in 215 BCE during the Second Punic War. The law forbade women from owning and wearing jewelry and colorful garments. Cato the Censor tried strenuously to defend the statute but Roman women occupied the streets and did not disperse until the law had been repealed unanimously. Aemilia, wife of Scipio Africanus, was a emblem of all Cato hated and he feared: a rich and independent matron who paraded through Rome with her expensive attire. Aemilia died a few years after the lex Voconia passed in 169 BC. This statute supported once again by Cato the Censor prevented citizens enrolled in the first class of citizens to establish as heirs women. According to Roman law scholars the law applied only to male citizens. But through Aemilia’s succession, one of the most ancient attested in literature, I attempt to demonstrate that it prevented not only men but also women from choosing a woman as heir. Thanks to the lex Voconia a rich woman could not prefer a daughter to a son. She could not escape by making a will to the ancient rules of intestate succession that always preferred the relatives in the male line. The law prevented a woman from being heres, heir, in the full meaning of the term of her father or mother’s estate, and especially of the forms of power associated with it. The symbolic value of this provision would cross the centuries to modernity. Aemilia had obtained her enormous estate from her husband by a will and she was forbidden from establishing as heirs in a will her two daughters Corneliae. Emilia was thus forced to establish as heir her adopted nephew: Scipio Aemilianus, her brother’s son. Nevertheless, she was able to bypass the law disposing that Scipio pay to her daughters, two dowries so huge as to appear as portions of the estate. Scipio paid the sums but gave Aemilia’s famous and expensive jewelry to his mother thus depriving the two daughters. This complex succession explains the famous exemplum on Cornelia who replied to a matron boasting her jewels as the most beautiful of the century: “These are my jewels” (Haec ornamenta sunt mea) by showing her sons, the Gracchi. The matron perhaps was provoking Cornelia given the Roman bewilderment for this intricate succession and the lost jewelry. However, Cornelia answered opposing a social integration based not on a subordinate role but on the awareness of her specific function of educator of children.

Towards the middle of the second century CE the figurative and symbolic apparatus exhibited by the first emperors in the amphitheatre can help shed further light on the birth of the institute of servi poenae. This peculiar condition finds a new meaning when placed in the history of the conflict between the punitive power of the dominus on his slaves and the punitive power of the emperor on all the inhabitants of the empire, free or slaves they may be. The opposition between these two coexisting punitive powers manifested itself during the ludi, when the princeps, on his own initiative or to meet the favour of the audience, wished to free a slave punished in the arena by his dominus. The owner’s power to free his slaves (even after he had condemned them to die) could potentially undermine the stature of the princeps. The paper examines the progressive legislation that ensured control on every aspect of the games and on the bodies of the condemned. The prevalent cult of Nemesis in the amphitheatre displays visually the new conception of imperial justice.