Pekulium

The pekulium or peculium (from Latin pecus = cattle ) is owned by people who, according to their legal status, have only limited property rights .

In Roman antiquity , the peculium was a separate part of the property of the pater familias , which the pater familias left to his son or a slave for independent management. Often it was a herd of cattle (hence the Latin name), but it could also be a business enterprise. De jure it remained the property of the head of the household, in fact the owner could freely dispose of it. With the profit made from their peculium, slaves could buy themselves out . The Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro recommended in his work De re rustica , which 37 BC The award of a pekulium appeared as a reward for good work or as a motivation for it.

In modern times , the pekulium is a kind of wage paid to a prisoner . It is intended to help the prisoner to take up a normal, non-criminal life after his release. This is justified by the fact that prisoners should only lose the freedom to choose their whereabouts while they are in prison. In the Swiss penal institution of Lenzburg, for example, the pekulium was introduced in 1864.

Web links

Profitable pekulium How a Romanian prison inmate finances his family, October 15, 2009, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

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↑ Elmar Bund : Peculium . In: The Little Pauly . dtv, Munich 1979, Vol. 4, Col. 577 f.
↑ Varro: De re rustica 1, 17, 5 ( online , accessed June 30, 2015); Andrea Binsfeld: Slavery as an economic form. Slaves in antiquity - omnipresent, but also profitable? In: History in Science and Education 66, Issue 5/6 (2015). P. 273.

[1] Elmar Bund : Peculium . In: The Little Pauly . dtv, Munich 1979, Vol. 4, Col. 577 f.

[2] Varro: De re rustica 1, 17, 5 ( online , accessed June 30, 2015); Andrea Binsfeld: Slavery as an economic form. Slaves in antiquity - omnipresent, but also profitable? In: History in Science and Education 66, Issue 5/6 (2015). P. 273.