Nexum was a debt bondage contract in the early Roman Republic.

Creditors might profit more from a nexum contract, as they received a motivated contractual worker instead of a slave.

An indebted paterfamilias, or legal head of the Roman household, might offer his own son for nexum instead of himself.

Because of the legal institute of the nexum a debtor could become a slave of his creditor.

This form of incarceration was used for slaves, and in early time for debtors who failed to pay their creditors (see nexum).

Although nexum was abolished as a way to secure a loan, debt bondage might still result after a debtor defaulted.

Under the nexum contract, a free man became a bond slave, or nexus, until he could pay off his debt to the creditor, or obaeratus.

Nexum was a form of mancipatio, a symbolic transfer of rights that involved a set of scales, copper weights, and a formulaic oath.

Nexum was abolished by the Lex Poetelia Papiria in 326 BC.

All people confined under the nexum contract were released, and nexum as a form of legal contract was forbidden thereafter.

Entitled Ex Nexum, the sculpture consists of a text-inscribed serpentine bronze screen flanked by two tall blocks of granite.

The form of labour exploitation during this archaic period was the nexum, which was what historians call debt bondage, bonded labour, or debt slavery.

Despite constraining a free person's liberty (libertas), nexum contracts were a preferable alternative to slavery for debtors, since slaves could be sold or killed by their masters at will.

The Lex Poetelia Papiria was a law passed in Ancient Rome that abolished the contractual form of Nexum, or debt bondage.

According to the Augustan-era historian Livy, nexum was abolished because of the excessive cruelty and lust of a single usurer, Lucius Papirius.

Lucius Papirius, a creditor whose sexually motivated abuse of his bond slave is supposed to have led to the abolishment of debt bondage in Rome; see nexum.

Varro alternatively dates the abolishment of nexum to 313 BC, during the dictatorship of Gaius Poetelius Libo Visolus.

Varro derives the word nexum from nec suum, "not one's own," and although this etymology is incorrect in light of modern scientific linguistics, it illuminates how the Roman understood the term.

Nexum was abolished by the Lex Poetelia Papiria in 326 BC, in part to prevent abuses to the physical integrity of citizens who had fallen into debt bondage.

After the club closed in January 2006 following the refusal of a 4am licence, it was bought in May by national operator Nexum Leisure who undertook a £1m refurbishment of the venue.

Though nexum as a legal contract was abolished, debt bondage persisted in the case of defaulting debtors, since a court could grant creditors the right to take insolvent debtors as bond slaves.

Roman historians illuminated the abolition of nexum with a traditional story that varied in its particulars; basically, a nexus who was a handsome but upstanding youth suffered sexual harassment by the holder of the debt.

It remains unclear whether debtors entered into a nexum contract initially with their loan or if they entered voluntarily after they could not pay off an existing debt, though the former seems more likely to be the case.

As farmers and laborers lost access to the land that theoretically was held in common by the Roman people (populus Romanus), they were unable to earn a living, and nexum was resorted to as security for debts.

With rivals such as Premium Bars & Restaurants, Novus Leisure, Regent Inns and Nexum Leisure looking the worse for wear, Britain’s biggest nightclub operator seems no more than mildly tipsy.