Phersu, Prosōpon, Persona: On Legal Personhood, Roman Sculpture and the Art of Law

Abstract

Many legal scholars and philosophers have recently embraced the idea of granting legal personhood and rights to entities other than human beings or their collective organisations. In search for effective innovations, however, it is also important to rethink the notions of legal personhood and rights themselves. This article aims to contribute to such a process of rethinking by examining the intellectual history of legal personhood. Tracing down the modern concept of the legal person not only to Latin persona, but also to Greek prosōpon and Etruscan phersu, it supplements (and partly also corrects) leading accounts of that concept’s history such as that of Hannah Arendt. Concurringly, it will not only connect (as Arendt and others have done) Roman legal personhood to ancient drama, but also to ancient sculpture. Finally, it will be argued that a deeper and broader understanding of the concept’s intellectual history may serve as a surprising source for future renewal.

Keywords: legal personhood, Hannah Arendt, Roman law, Roman sculpture