Muros esse sanctos

'Walls are holy'

My current project on Sacrosanctity these days is focusing on the res sacra and res sancta distinction in Roman law.  Both appear prominently in the Roman rerum divisio, as my Roman law students, who have just been examined in the Roman law of property, will know.  Eventually, these two categories are fused together, most visibly in the tribunician potestas sacrosancta.  

Both (along with the third, res religiosae) fall under the broader category of res nullius - things belonging to nobody.   But unlike unclaimed lands, wild animals, the sea, there is a special reason why these are nullius.  Res sacrae and res sanctae are inviolable.

Inst. 2.1.7 et seq.

They have been 'dedicated' or 'consecrated' to God, or 'sanctified' by a lex sancta creating a sanctio. This includes the leges sacratae, a sworn plebeian oath which in effect endows tribunes with 'sacrosanctity' by the curse of rendering any violator a homo sacer, a sacred outlaw, the focus of Giorgio Agamben's book of the same title. 

This topic is endlessly fascinating for me, partly for the theological dimension to it.  It provides an additional layer of meaning and complexity to 'Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.'  But more specifically for the function of being 'sanctified' - not in the Roman Rite - but in Roman law which literally means having a penalty, a 'sanction,' fixed for violating something meant to be inviolable.  

D.1.8.8

The effect of sanction is sanctum - something is protected as being inviolable, 'holy':  'Sanctum' is that which is protected and fortified from the injuries of men.  So, we might call 'sanctuary cities' inviolable in this way.  So too are ambassadors, as the Digest observes here, that the word 'sanctum' originates from 'Sagmina' which were the sacred herbs carried by ambassadors to indicate their inviolability.

But perhaps most visible artifacts of this quality of sanctity were walls.  And so holy and inviolable were they that to scale city walls were regarded a capital offense.  From the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, to Donald Trump's Build the Wall, is this sacral veneration of walls somehow hardwired genetically into the human social and political experience?