Inequality at the origin of law. From " communism " to Rome ?

Sometimes academic exercises, with their paradoxes and exaggerations, can help us grasp complex concepts. This is what happens with Latin declamations, short speeches born in rhetoric schools. They represent a way of approaching Roman mentality and culture, and have therefore attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Declamation minor 261 (Declamatio minor) - a work by Quintilian or one of his emulators, probably written in the late ^1st or 2nd^century AD -discusses an imaginary law proposal. - discusses an imaginary law proposal, which aims to redistribute all goods among citizens, to make wealth equal (and thus prevent any attempt to seize political power through wealth). The declamation takes us through a close critique of this project, right down to its central point: equalizing wealth would violate the very raison d'être of law. Law arises precisely from the desire to guarantee the preservation of one's property, which is the function of equity. Equality, on the other hand, is exposed as a factor contradictory to law. The proposal to equalize property thus serves as a counter-model for the emergence - in the eyes of the Romans, but also of a long modern legal, philosophical and historiographical tradition - of the archetypal link between law and the protection of private property.