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By Root 568 0

life could not function without the recognition that financial loss can only be tolerated to a certain degree; economics in this sense is the sign par excellence of human mortality. At least from the time of Marx, economists have recognized that the inequalities created by both theft and usury spring from some original condition or event that should never have occurred. For Marx, that event was the colonial expropriation of the natural resources of what became the colonies of Western states; such was the original sin, as he explicitly but ironically termed it, of political economy. The idea of an incurable original sin was thus, like the doctrine of the church, a convenient fiction for those who actually controlled the resources in question, whereas the indebtedness it represented was not necessarily irreversible; this view, appropriately modified, has been extended by modern economists to the fiction that emerging nations are incapable of borrowing in foreign currency-a mystification to which there is nothing, say these economists, that compels such countries to surrender their independence as they so often do.9

Debt is about redemption, a temporal process. The church holds out the promise of eternal bliss in exchange for a carefully paced process of expiation. The state does so through its management of a legal system that frequentlysometimes through the actions of corrupt officials, who allegedly use their authority to extort bribes-reduces citizens to the status of offenders. Romans have no difficulty in articulating this parallel: "We are guilty as soon as we are born. No matter what! Whether in dealing with the state or in dealing with religion," as one shopkeeper put it, adding that it "seems like a prison, because it has to be oppressive" in forcing people to live "with a sense of guilt" but without actually knowing what they have done. On the other hand, they also enjoy the security of knowing that this "excuse" (scusal will bring certain forgiveness in its train. The everyday sense of original sin thus ensures compliance through constant reminders of human imperfection and of the necessity of expiating its stains.

Punishment consists in the payment of fines, but delays can sometimes buy redemption from the state. Not so with usurers, who enslave people to debts that spring from their own economic incapacities. Usurers thus reproduce the universal human indebtedness to the devil, incurred at the time of the expulsion from Paradise. Because indebtedness involves the payment of interest, and because interest is calculated on the basis of time, this common form of social distress-which leaves debtors at the mercy of events they often cannot control-injects a viscerally painful temporality, of real time with all its uncertainty and unpredictability, into social experience. 10 The barrier to eternity is the temporality of moral and financial debt, its redemption forever deferred to reinforce the maintenance of real power.

The church formalizes redemption for minor offenses by issuing indulgences-documents awarding a specific (and finites degree of relief from time in Purgatory, where sinners are cleansed of the remaining miasma of original sin before entering Paradise. The Italian state adopted a virtually identical model in its practice of issuing pardons for unpaid fines in exchange for the immediate payment of a small fraction of those fines, and this, as we shall see, allowed for the ongoing construction of a city that ultimately can be read as a palimpsest of consecutive and overlapping violations of all sorts of laws, but especially those pertaining to zoning, traffic control, and historic conservation-that is, to the very fabric of the Romans' inhabited space.

Original Sinners or Elder Brothers?

In this sense, the material presence of the historical past is the temporal record of the wages of a form of original sin made inevitable by the fact that the laws thus violated are of human, not divine, inspiration-and are therefore made by legislators who, all too human in their desires, are themselves