This is the original text: "Si pater filium ter venum duit, filius a patre liber esto".
I understand that the pater familias could decide to kill every member of the family if he wanted, so it makes sense that he could also sell them but how could he do it thrice? Would the son come back? Did he sell him for a limited amount of time? Why was this law written and why was the limit set on three times?
I tried to ask this to my teacher but she was very elusive and didn't answer me.
Thank you!
Edit: spelling
how could he do it thrice?how could he do it thrice?
By buying him back? By stipulating conditions to the sale? Selling Romans into slavery, we're assured by the jurists, was an artifact of debt-slavery, in which the body was held as collateral. I mean, how would you get collateral back?
In any case, there's no attested instance of this ever actually occurring. Presumably it did in the extremely ancient history of the city, but even the jurists are ignorant of any archaic cases. Rather, what the Twelve Tables is stipulating here is not a provision for selling children into debt-slavery, but a provision for emancipatio. By the historical period what's being described here was a somewhat elaborate ritual in which the father would "sell" at a symbolic price his son to a friend, who would then "manumit" his "slave" and return him to his father. The symbolic sale and manumission would be repeated again. On the third time the father would "sell" his son again and, instead of having him manumitted would then "buy" him back again symbolically from his friend, so that the father could manumit his son on the third pass, so that the friend did not symbolically gain patronage over him. The son would then become sui iuris