Resumen de Responsabilità del venditore per difetti della merce. Appunti a margine di Philogelos 18
The aim of the article is to deepen the understanding of the joke in Philogelos 18 by bringing out its legal connotations. The joke features an Egghead being informed by the buyer that the slave he has sold him has died, upon which he replies that the slave had never done such a thing before. The legal background here is the responsibility of the seller for physical flaws of the sale's object, which was, in case of slaves, regulated in the Aedilician edict. While the buyer seems to be referring to an illness as the presumable cause of the slave's death, the seller's answer would only make sense if it applied to another "defect" -the slave running away.
