Depicting justice, weighing fairness

Unable to find it easily on earth, men and women have often devoted themselves to painting justice. From the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus to Andrea Mantegna, via Roman coins, images give substance to the desire for justice and help us to grasp the contours of the concepts. One thing is clear: although intimately linked, for the Romans justice and equity were two distinct ideas, and words bear the imprint of this. While justice is linked to law (ius), equity originates from the adjective aequus (-a / -um), meaning "uniform", "flat" in a horizontal sense. Aequus is therefore endowed with great metaphorical capacity, triggered by the idea of balance, of "symmetry". This can be seen in many fields, including that of weights, as aequus expresses the relationship of correspondence (which is not necessarily "equality") between one object and another. Roman jurists seized upon it - and the reading of two exemplary texts brings us to the heart of their thinking - because for them it was also a matter of counting and weighing, to restore balance to (political) society, whose conflicts of interest threatened to dissolve its bonds. It's when we talk about fairness and justice that we grasp the full truth of this statement: "to understand a word is to make the other understand it".