Roman sacredness could make a person killable with impunity, not just inviolable

Evidence

In the Latin of the Roman Republic, the word sacer referred to anything that was owned by a deity, having been “taken out of the region of the profanum by the action of the State, and passed on into that of the sacrum.” However, even then there was an intriguing exception: the term homo sacer was used for someone who, as the result of a curse (sacer esto), became an outlaw liable to be killed by anyone with impunity. Thus while the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sacredness of homo sacer made him eminently subject to violence. This contradictory usage has been explained by classicists (with the acknowledged help of anthropologist colleagues) in terms of “taboo,” a supposedly primitive notion that confounds ideas of the sacred with those of the unclean, ideas that “spiritual” religion was later to distinguish and use more logically. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Agamben’s Homo Sacer treats this as the foundational paradox of sovereign power — this is the primary source of that concept.
• SHARE: Send to anyone interested in political theology or Agamben — the two opposed senses of sacer in a single term.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the double meaning of sacer: property belonging to a god vs. a cursed outlaw.