Moral rights in ancient Rome

In the ancient Rome, an intellectual property law didn’t exist, however it can be seen an influence in which we nowadays call “moral right” of the author. Virgil’s couplet is well known: the poet composed this work for Emperor Augustus and Bathyllus stole the authorship. Virgil had written a couplet which celebrated the victory of Augustus against Anthony and Cleopatra, and he had eventually decided to engrave the piece on the Emperor’s door: “Nocte pluit tota, redeunt spectacula mane: Divisum imperium cum Jove Caesar habet” ( It rained all night , The Wonders are back in the morning : Caesar has his Empire Divided with Jupiter ). Bathyllus appropriated these verses and in return he was praised by the Emperor himself. In response to this, on the door of the Emperor, some words appeared, they were repeated four times: “Sic vos, non vobis.” The Emperor asked everyone to explain what those words meant, but no one was able to give a convincing explanation. Virgil finally decided to appear before the Emperor and claimed his moral rights. He declared that the verses had been stolen by Bathyllus, then he added: “Hos ego versiculos feces, tulit alter honores” (I wrote those lines, but another bears the honor). That case may be considered as the first intellectual property litigation in history.

This contribution of the Roman world was also recognized as a landmark ruling by the Italian Constitutional Court in a case related to plagiarism, the judgment no. 96 of 1981, which recognized Martial as the first author who used the term “plagiarism” in a modern sense, recognizing a primitive moral protection on the work created: “The historical investigation has largely confirmed that, as the ancient Latin writers had already warned, “Plagium” comes from Greek and it has been used in legal terms since the third century BC to designate the act of seizing, holding or trading a free man or a third party’s slave . Martial, in his famous Epigram 52, uses the word figuratively, comparing the false attribution of third party’s literary works to the unlawful subjugation of third party’s slaves, thus creating a second meaning, which still survives in modern languages (see the Italian plagio, French plagiat, English plagiarism, German Plagiat), indicating the action to be passed as the author of other people’s intellectual products and to play them fraudulently. ”

By Giacomo Pataracchia