Asylum (antiquity)

In ancient Greece and Rome, an asylum was a place where people facing persecution could seek refuge.

[2] There is also an instance of Adonijah, after a failed coup, seeking refuge from the newly anointed Solomon by grasping the horns of a sacrificial altar.

[3] In ancient Greece the temples, altars, sacred groves, and statues of the gods generally possessed the privileges of protecting slaves, debtors, and criminals, who fled to them for refuge.

The laws, however, do not appear to have recognised the right of all such sacred places to afford the protection which was claimed, but to have confined it to a certain number of temples, or altars, which were considered in a more especial manner to have the asylia (Servius ad Virg.

Among the most celebrated places of asylum in other parts of Greece, there are the temple of Poseidon in Laconia, on Mount Taenarus (Time.

It would appear, however, that all sacred places were supposed to protect an individual to a certain extent, even if their right to do so was not recognised by the laws of the state, in which they were situated.

The 464 BC Sparta earthquake has been viewed by the contemporaries as divine vengeance for the Spartan ephors' murder of helots in violation of the asylum in the Tainaron temple.

In the republican and early imperial times, a right of asylum, such as existed in the Greek states, does not appear to have been recognised by Roman law.

If it could be proved that any individual had instigated the slave of another to flee to the statue of an emperor, he was liable to an action corrupti servi.

[9] In the time of Tiberius, the number of places possessing the jus asyli in the cities in Greece and Asia Minor became so numerous as to seriously impede the administration of justice.

In consequence of this, the Roman senate, by the command of the emperor, limited the jus asyli to a few cities, but did not entirely abolish it, as Suetonius (Tiberius 37) has erroneously stated.

Anyone, no matter their social status or crime, was free to enter, if they could reach the site before being overtaken by their pursuers.

Here a heiau (temple) preserved the bones of Keawe, a great chief who died c. 1725 and was later believed to be a god.

The kapu system itself was officially abolished in a taboo-breaking ceremony by King Kamehameha II and his court in 1819, after which the importance of pu'uhonua declined, since there was no longer a need for their powers of absolution.