What is interesting for this study is the connection the ancient Roman lawyers indicated between the contracts for hiring of commodities on the one hand and agreements concerning labour on the other, and particularly the casting of roles this connection implied.One party, thelocator placed something - a horse, a ship, a slave, etc. - at the disposal of the other party, the conductor, in exchange for economic remuneration, and this contract gave the conductor far-reaching rights to unilaterally decide how to utilise the object that he rented.60 The legal classification of a working person was linked to the notions that different social positions meant different legal status. From the time of the second century AD, the basic classification of Roman civil law was divided into personæ-res-actiones (persons-property/things-civil procedure).61 According to ancient Roman law, a person’s status originally meant his or her position in society, including the legal system, and a person could have several different kinds of status, depending on the context in which he or she was at the moment.The consequences of status were to be found in the law concerning persons, ius personarum, while the consequences of locatio were found inres, as well as inactiones.62These issues and concepts from ancient Roman law were later to be twisted by the learned European jurists in order to analyse whether the worker’s subordinate position should, or should not, be considered as an “inherent” component of his or her agreement with an employer. The modern “liberal” notion of the relationship between employer and worker as one of exchange between two formallyequal parties is historically linked to the ideological and social changes of the 19th century. During the previous centuries, however, the dominant pattern of law concerning labour relations openly expressed ideas of inequality and of a legal differentiation that was c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 41 60 Reber , pp. -. 61 Kaser , p. . 62 Kaser , p. ; Borkowski , pp. , ; Samuel , pp. -; Peterson, C, pp. -.
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